Channel News
CJ Fairfield
“As a service company, we are here to advise and consult on our client’s new strategies and plans. We are here to help you integrate and leverage new converged technology solutions and we are here to deliver on our strategic intent to help our customers transform their businesses and grow,” says Rich Fennessy, CEO of Trace3.
Between investing in data and analytics, AI, M&A, and growing its team and customer base, Trace3 wants to ensure it is “always evolving and growing faster” than the industry.
Actually, CEO Rich Fennessy plans to almost double the company’s revenue in three years.
Today, the technology consultancy generates $2.5 billion in revenue and plans to grow that to $4 billion by 2026. In the last year alone, the company has seen growth by more than 30% and added approximately 300 new customers.
The company hired about 150 employees last year and has more than 3,750 customers in all 50 states.
“All the possibilities are in the technology,” Fennessy said at Irvine, Calif.-based Trace3’s Evolve conference in Las Vegas in September. “It’s a state of mind that fuels us every day.”
The company has a five-year roadmap, launching in 2021, which includes growth in four key areas: customer engagementservice maturity, talent and expertise, and geographic reach through mergers and acquisitions.
(Related: Trace3 CISO Says 2023 Security Sales On Track To Hit $1 Billion)
“This plan is designed to provide us with clarity in our growth strategies and also to ensure alignment within our business,” he said. “The goal of this plan is very simple. This is to ensure that Trace3 is always evolving and growing faster than the industry.
It also plans to develop a more efficient backend to support integrated technology and enhance service-based solutions and partner relationships as well as its emerging technology value proposition.
“At a high level, we envision this next phase focused on significantly expanding our services and consulting capabilities to help our customers modernize their IT environments,” he said. “We believe it is through a service-led approach that we can deliver the greatest value to our customers, particularly given current industry dynamics.
“To grow our service capabilities, we are making internal investments every day to develop our expertise, increase our maturity and accelerate our path to a service-oriented approach,” he added. “(We are) also very focused on acquiring interesting companies with great capabilities.”
In April, Trace3 acquired Houston-based Set Solutionsallowing the combined company to deepen its cybersecurity capabilities, which in turn leads to greater success for commercial and enterprise customers.
Trace3 even took a step back this year to refocus on the data and analytics capabilities it can bring to its customers, according to Asher Lohman, vice president of data and analytics at Trace3.
“So how do we understand the data landscape with a customer, understand their challenges and solve those use cases,” Lohman told CRN.
Trace3 now works across the “full spectrum of data and analytics,” from data strategy, building a modern data platform, solving AI or machine learning challenges, and evolving in the generative AI landscape.
“It’s about how to help our clients navigate this so they can achieve a positive outcome,” he said. “A lot of the challenges are that the foundations that build the tools to leverage data aren’t there for many businesses. They want generative AI, they want AI, they want ML, but they haven’t taken the time to build a solid foundation on which they have quality data. They need a partner like Trace3 to help them decode this. This involves repairing and potentially cleaning up decades of existing infrastructure.
But growth isn’t just about data and analytics. Trace3’s cybersecurity business has grown more than 70% over the last year, according to Fennessy.
“Our industry is in the midst of a significant transformation,” Fennessy said. “Organizations are accelerating or moving toward a hybrid cloud environment while increasing their commitment to data-driven decision-making. Yes, securing the business remains a top priority. In the past, many IT organizations have addressed these three topics of data, cloud and security by creating single, siled strategies and plans. I can tell you that in today’s market, these topics are rapidly converging and require an integrated strategy. It’s now a must-have rather than a nice-to-have given the speed of innovation.
He said that because generative AI “has the opportunity to be a huge game-changer,” businesses need to understand the full benefits and have a converged IT strategy around it.
“As a service company, we are here to advise our clients on new strategies and plans,” he said. “We are here to help integrate and leverage new converged technology solutions and we are here to deliver on our strategic intent to help our customers transform their businesses and grow. »
