Best wishes from Ben

Dear Partner, Client,

Even though last year was still largely dominated by COVID-19, the Cybersecurity infrastructure market continued to evolve and revealed intriguing trends.

There has been continuous movement within the mergers and acquisitions space. A snapshot out of a long list includes Palo Alto Networks acquiring Bridgecrew and SentinelOne taking over Scalyr. Some vendors even did multiple acquisitions throughout the year: F5 with Volterra & Threat Stack, Fortinet with ShiledX & Sken.ai and Okta acquired Auth0 & at Spoke.

In 2021, more than 800M$ investment funds were granted to a number of vendors. Axonius and Nozomi both got 100M$, while Exabeam collected 200M$. Wasabi obtained 32M$ in a first round and 137M$ in total after a second and third round. And Vectra and Tanium received funding for 130M$ and 150M$ respectively.

The distribution landscape did not go undisturbed either. Tech Data was acquired by Synnex and Ingram Micro is now part of Platinum Equity. Kappa Data moved into France through the acquisition of Exer while Nuvias took over Cloud Distribution in the UK & Deltalink in Belgium.

Exclusive Networks also continued to execute on its M&A strategy by acquiring IGNITION TECHNOLOGY, the northern European-based cybersecurity VAD that focuses on early-stage security-as-a-service (SaaS) vendors. This acquisition gives us a unique, powerful and focused offering for innovative cybersecurity vendors wherever they are on their growth journey.

On December 2nd we announced the acquisition of NETWORKS UNLIMITED. Headquartered in South Africa, with further operations in Kenya and Mauritius, they have a partner ecosystem giving access to 38 national markets across the sub-Saharan region. This acquisition expands our global footprint and creates more opportunities for vendors and customers of both organizations.

A huge milestone in Exclusive Networks’ history was our public listing on the Euronext Paris stock exchange on September 23. We’ve come a long way, and we still have so much more to achieve together. We will continue to innovate, inspire and stay focused on our vision to help create a ‘totally trusted digital world’.

Exclusive Networks Belgium keeps investing in expertise, added value and quality. We are increasing the focus on our GSI partners by creating a designated GSI team, which will be headed by Ingrid Dierickx. We are investing in our Services organization both in Service Sales as in Service Delivery. To keep all these plans on track we’ve hired a new Sales Director, starting on January 1, 2022.

As is our tradition, we added new and exciting vendors to our portfolio. JUNIPER – with a focus on the AI driven enterprise. SALT SECURITY – Context-based security for all your APIs. NETSKOPE – cloud-native solutions to businesses for data protection and defense against threats in cloud applications, cloud infrastructure, and the web. And last but not least, WASABI – Cloud-based object storage.

We as Exclusive Networks BeLux have been able to arrive where we are today thanks to all of you: our reseller partners, vendors and end customers.

I want to “THANK YOU” for your continued commitment, support and above all – trust and confidence in doing business with us.