The 50 leaders shaping the UK technology channel
Vendor, distribution and MSP leaders, and the rising names behind them, recognized for what they’ve built this year, not for their job titles. Chosen and ranked by the VETTDD editorial team from company results, filings and announcements, September 2026.
Graham Charlton
Chief Executive, Softcat
Softcat’s gross invoiced income passed £2bn in the six months to January 2026, up 33.3%, as hardware sales rose 78.7% on AI infrastructure demand. Under Charlton, chief executive since August 2023, the company raised its profit guidance three times this year and in September agreed to buy Dallas-based GDT for $1.05bn (£785m). The deal takes the UK channel’s bellwether reseller into the US.
Mike Norris
Chief Executive Officer, Computacenter
Computacenter’s revenue rose 71.6% to £6.85bn in the first half of 2026 and adjusted profit before tax rose 87% to £152.4m, as hyperscale and neocloud customers in North America drove a record £9.3bn order backlog. The company joined the FTSE 100 in June and expects full-year profit of at least £380m. Under Norris, chief executive since 1994, it has become the channel’s clearest proof that AI infrastructure spending is flowing through partners.
Sam Mudd
Chief Executive Officer, Bytes Technology Group
Mudd has led Bytes since May 2024 through Microsoft’s shift of partner incentives toward consumption-based and service-led funding. In the year to February 2026 gross invoiced income rose 11.5% to £2.34bn, with services up 24.6%. She then split the group cleanly into private-sector Bytes and public-sector Phoenix. By September, first-half gross invoiced income was up about 19% and guidance was raised. Bytes is the purest listed read on the UK Microsoft licensing channel.
Hayley Roberts
Founder and CEO, Distology
Roberts moved Distology from NorthEdge to Foresight Group in September 2026 rather than sell to trade, on revenue of about £80m in the 2026 financial year and an expected £100m in 2027. In the past 12 months the Stockport cyber distributor signed Tenable and Snyk among a larger than usual intake of vendors, and it now plans to buy a distributor in Germany. For vendors and resellers, it is a UK-founded specialist building toward a pan-European VAD.
Terry O’Brien
CEO, Giacom
O’Brien has spent the past year completing Giacom’s one-stop marketplace for more than 6,000 UK resellers and MSPs. It added EE to give partners all three UK mobile networks, merged them into one Velocity proposition, brought in Huntress for managed security and hired a managing director for cloud. Its billing software now processes almost £3bn of partners’ annual retail billing. For small MSPs moving into Microsoft, mobile and connectivity together, Giacom is increasingly where that business is bought and billed.
Charlie Tunley
Channel & Partner Ecosystem Director, UKIMEA, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Tunley has been HPE’s main UK channel voice through 2026. HPE restored 30-day quote validity in June and in August dropped repricing terms on deals under $1m, a change he says put it among the first vendors to act. He is now taking UK partners into a single HPE and Juniper program from 1 November, and in August HPE added Infinigate UK as a specialist networking distributor. Both moves bear directly on partner margins and routes to market.
Joachim Mason
Managing Director, Partner and Specialist Sales, UK&I, Cisco
Mason led Cisco’s UK and Ireland partners through the switch to Cisco 360, which replaced the Gold, Premier and Select tiers on 25 January 2026. He told partners Cisco would spend “the same, if not more” on them under the new program. Large partners moved fast: Cisilion says it is one of 30 UK Managed Partners with multiple Preferred designations. Mason is now steering partners toward the outcome-based services that 360 rewards.
Simon Williams
Chief Executive Officer, Trustmarque Ultima
Williams completed the merger of Trustmarque and Ultima in November 2025, creating a group with more than 1,000 staff, 3,000 customers and, as reported by IT Channel Oxygen, £742m of pro-forma gross sales. In September 2026 he relaunched it as TMU and said its Cisco business had grown 93% in a year. The combined group targets more than £1bn in gross invoiced income and ranks among the largest independent integrators in the UK.
Charles Nasser
Founder and CEO, Claranet
In June 2026 Nasser, who founded Claranet in 1996, bought UK managed services provider Six Degrees, taking the enlarged group to 3,500 staff and, Claranet says, more than €650m (£565m) of revenue. About 200 Six Degrees employees moved across. The deal adds UK scale to a pan-European managed service provider that Nasser has built over three decades, through around 40 acquisitions of its own.
Sunil Madhani
Regional Managing Director – UK&I, Westcoast
Madhani has steered Westcoast through its first 19 months inside ALSO, which paid €553m (£480m) for the Theale distributor. He says it has signed about 50 new vendors since the deal, more than in the previous 20 years, as its French and German businesses moved into ALSO and Westcoast Cloud’s £150m business merges into ALSO Cloud UK. For UK resellers, he is bringing a distributor built on account management into a European group with €8.3bn of half-year revenue.
Rich Thompson
Chief Executive Officer, ANS
ANS became the first UK partner to earn Microsoft’s Frontier Partner designation in March 2026, four months after being named Microsoft’s UK Partner of the Year. Under Thompson, chief executive since October 2022, it bought data specialist Makutu and Business Central partner Sci-Net in 2025, adding 90 staff. Its 2024 accounts show adjusted EBITDA up 11% to £30.5m on turnover of £132.8m. ANS gives UK partners a working model of what Microsoft’s AI partner tiers require.
Penny Williams
SVP and Managing Director, UK and International, CDW UK
CDW’s UK and Canadian operations grew sales 22.9% to $826m (£618m) in the second quarter of 2026. Under Williams, managing director since October 2024, CDW UK signed an MoD support contract for the RAF’s Poseidon fleet, became prime IT supplier to the 2027 Ryder Cup and hired new heads of managed services and private-sector sales. Her push into services puts a US-backed reseller in more direct competition with UK integrators for large, complex contracts.
Andy Rhodes
General Manager, UK&I, Lenovo
Rhodes took over Lenovo UK and Ireland in April 2026 after senior roles at HP and Dell. He has been open with partners about the memory crunch: Lenovo passed on price rises early, is holding 30-day quote validity, and he expects inflation to last “over the next couple of years”. With Lenovo’s infrastructure revenue up 98% to $8.5bn in its latest quarter, he is pushing PC partners to cross-sell data center products. His calls shape pricing and stock decisions for UK device resellers.
Joe Carroll
Director for Partners, UK&I, AWS
Carroll runs AWS’s partner business in the UK and Ireland at a time when AWS sales grew 37% to $42.2bn in the second quarter of 2026. He has put distributors at the center of its UK channel, arguing they are how “thousands and thousands” of smaller partners get onboarded and skilled. With AWS investing £8bn in UK data centers from 2024 to 2028, his programs shape how much of that capacity partners sell and run.
Ruth Patterson
Vice President and Managing Director, UK&I, HP Inc.
Patterson has run HP Inc. in the UK and Ireland since February 2025 and has made partner engagement her stated priority, telling Fortune in August 2026 that “their success is our success”. She is leading the UK business as HP’s net revenue rose 12.5% to $15.7bn and its Personal Systems revenue rose 18% in the quarter to July. In July she installed a new UK and Ireland channel director. Her partner-first approach sets the tone for how HP works with the UK device channel.
John Taylor
Vice President, Channels & Alliances, Europe & Israel, CrowdStrike
Taylor runs CrowdStrike’s channels and alliances across Europe and Israel. At its May 2026 Europe Partner Symposium, UK partners Softcat and BT won Europe Partner of the Year and Innovation Partner of the Year. CrowdStrike says its MSSP business has passed $1.3bn in total contract value over three years, and its annual recurring revenue grew 25% to $5.84bn in the year to July 2026. For UK MSSPs and resellers, his programs set how much of that growth they share.
Ursula Morgenstern
CEO, Littlefish Group
Morgenstern, Littlefish’s chief executive since September 2024, bought Microsoft-focused security specialist Stripe OLT in February 2026, taking the Nottingham group to about 900 staff and adding penetration testing and SOC services. She has rebuilt the business as Littlefish Group around managed services, security, digital and data, and set a target of growing revenue from about £80m to £150m within three years. Her strategy is to scale a mid-market MSP through sector focus and targeted acquisitions.
Rob Coupland
Chief Executive Officer, Pulsant
Coupland, Pulsant’s chief executive since 2019, refinanced its debt facilities to £187m in October 2025, then opened a £10m, 1.2MW high-density data hall in Milton Keynes in February 2026 and put £1m into AI-ready capacity in Birmingham in September. His 14-site platformEDGE network gives MSPs and resellers regional, sovereign infrastructure to build services on without owning it, and positions Pulsant for AI inference outside the constrained London market.
Sherry Vaswani
Founder and CEO, Xalient
Xalient, the identity, security and networking integrator Vaswani founded, grew revenue 63% to £85.0m in 2024, with 71% earned outside the UK after acquisitions in the US and the Netherlands. Adjusted EBITDA rose 47% to £5.9m. In 2026 she is steering the business toward machine identities, AI and operational technology security. Xalient is a rare UK channel business whose biggest market is the US, and a guide for partners planning to follow.
Craig Robertson
Head of Partners, EMEA & LatAm, Everpure
Robertson was promoted in August 2026 to lead Everpure’s partners across EMEA and Latin America, a decade after joining as a UK channel account manager. He takes over as the former Pure Storage, renamed in February, pushes into data management: revenue rose 38% to $1.2bn in the quarter to August, and the company says its EMEA and LatAm business grew 64.9% in Q1. A UK channel leader now sets partner strategy for two regions and a channel-only vendor.
Dan Scott
Senior Director, IT Nation Community, ConnectWise
Scott co-led IT Nation Connect Europe in London in March 2026, which ConnectWise says sold out for a second year with more than 600 attendees, 28% of them first-timers. He runs ConnectWise’s Evolve peer groups in Europe, which he aimed in 2025 to double from nearly 60 member companies, and chairs GTIA’s UK and Ireland executive council. For UK MSP owners, he helps shape both a vendor-run and a vendor-neutral peer network.
Angus Shaw
Managing Director, Elovade UK&I, Elovade UK&I
Shaw led Brigantia through its April 2025 sale to Elovade, the German group’s largest acquisition and its first in the UK. He then bought Rochdale-based Zen Software in March 2026 and added Doc2, SuperOps, HighGround and Wasabi. In September he relaunched the business as Elovade UK&I and joined the group board. For UK MSPs, a specialist cyber distributor now sits inside a group that says it serves more than 25,000 partners across Europe.
Dave Stevinson
Group Chief Executive Officer, QBS Technology Group
Stevinson has kept QBS acquiring after its 2025 purchase of Prianto, buying EMT in Dubai and full ownership of Infonet in Türkiye, while becoming one of 12 AWS Marketplace sellers of record in EMEA. QBS says it now has recurring revenues above $700m (£524m), 12,500 vendors and more than 6,000 reseller partners, and he has hired a CFO, CRO and COO to integrate it. For UK partners, QBS is the main route to long-tail and specialist software.
Will Morey
Managing Director, Gamma Business, Gamma
Morey, managing director of Gamma Business since May 2025, rolled out the Gamma Edge growth program and a rebuilt Accelerate partner hub for more than 1,500 UK partners. In the first half of 2026 Gamma reported strong demand through the channel for Webex for Gamma, PhoneLine+ and full fibre. In September Epiris agreed a £1.02bn recommended takeover of Gamma and named the partner network among its reasons. The partner terms Morey sets are a direct input to UK reseller margins.
Stephen Fenby
Group CEO, Midwich Group
Fenby has led Midwich since 2010 and built it by acquisition into an AV distributor spanning Europe, North America, the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. In the first half of 2026 he returned it to profit growth: revenue rose 3.2% to £640.3m and adjusted profit before tax 10.3%. UC product sales grew by more than 30%, and the UK grew at double digits. As meeting-room technology becomes standard IT-channel business, a specialist AV distributor with a large UK share matters to more resellers and MSPs.
Michelle Senecal de Fonseca
Chief Executive Officer, Redcentric
Senecal de Fonseca, Redcentric’s chief executive since May 2025, completed the sale of its data center business to DWS-backed Stellanor in April 2026 for a final £124.9m, then returned £90m to shareholders through a tender offer. The agreed enterprise value of up to £127m was about 15.1 times the unit’s adjusted EBITDA. The deal turned the AIM-listed company into a pure managed service provider, a template for MSPs weighing whether to sell capital-heavy infrastructure and keep the services.
Jay Ball
Chief Executive Officer, Flotek Group
Ball co-founded Flotek in 2022 and has made it the UK channel’s fastest-growing business by headcount, according to IT Channel Oxygen’s 2026 Fast-Growth 50. Flotek bought Clear Telecom in July 2026, its 16th acquisition, and took full ownership of FlexiNet in February. Its first consolidated accounts show revenue up 85% to £14.1m and EBITDA of £2.2m in the year to June 2025. Flotek brings founder-led buy-and-build to the small end of the UK managed services market.
Nicola Saner
CEO, Chorus
Saner says Chorus doubled its channel managed security services revenue in a single year as the Bristol Microsoft specialist sold its 24/7 security operations center through other partners. In April 2026 it added Logicom, a distributor in more than 30 countries, to a roster that already included Infinigate Cloud, Dicker Data and ALSO Group. For UK MSPs without their own security operations center, Chorus offers a Microsoft-native service sold wholesale through the channel.
Mukesh Gupta
CEO, e92plus
Gupta, who co-founded e92plus in 1989, grew its turnover 12.5% to £73.7m in 2024. In October that year control passed to an employee ownership trust that now holds 51% of the group. His e92spark division for emerging vendors signed LinkShadow in July 2026, while e92plus added EfficientIP and ZeroFox’s MSSP program. It keeps an independent route to early-stage cyber vendors open for UK partners.
Andrew Gill
Vice President, IBM Technology Ecosystems & Select Territory Sales, UK & Ireland, IBM
Gill, IBM’s UK and Ireland ecosystem chief since August 2024, took on Select Territory sales as well by February 2026, as IBM set a goal for partners to carry 50% of its Select revenue without IBM lead-passing, according to Techaisle. SCC won IBM’s UK Technology Partner of the Year for a second year and Celerity took the Select segment award. For UK partners, IBM is offering a bigger share of accounts to a smaller, chosen group.
Chris Clarke
Director of Sales, UK and Ireland, Pax8
Clarke joined Pax8 in February 2026 to run UK and Ireland sales, after selling his Newbury MSP, Create IT, to Equity Networks in 2024. He leads a UK business that grew turnover 58% to £131m and gross profit 71% to £19.5m in 2024, as Pax8 pushes AI services to what it calls managed intelligence providers. A former MSP owner now sets the terms on which UK MSPs buy cloud licenses and AI services.
Hannah Birch
Chief Executive Officer, Kocho
Birch became Kocho’s chief executive in February 2025 and has since rebuilt the executive team, hired a new CTO and narrowed the business to Microsoft identity and security, a line whose revenue grew 30% in the year to March 2025. In September 2026 Kocho took live a four-year managed ICT contract with Border to Coast, the £120bn local government pension pool. Her public target is revenue above £50m, built on her view that specialist MSPs will pull ahead.
Hollie Whittles
HR & InfoSec Director, Purple Frog Systems
Whittles was appointed MBE in June 2026 for services to business, female entrepreneurship and skills. As the Federation of Small Businesses’ national skills policy champion she contributed to the Maple Review on barriers to entrepreneurship. As vice chair of GTIA’s UK and Ireland council she helped shape its Data and AI Guidebook, and in July 2026 collected GTIA’s IT service provider of the year award for Purple Frog. She is making the case that the channel’s AI growth depends on small-business skills.
Aaron Brown
Group Chief Executive Officer, Onecom
Brown, who co-founded Onecom in 2013, returned as chief operating officer in June 2025 and became group chief executive in May 2026. Onecom’s 2025 accounts show revenue up 3.4% to £205.2m and management EBITDA up 10.4% to £38.4m. Since his return it has launched the Wave cloud phone platform and the Halo AI platform, and merged its IT arms into the 80-person OnecomMatrix. He leads one of the channel’s biggest moves from telecoms reselling into managed IT.
Barney Taylor
Chief Executive Officer, Air IT Group
Taylor, chief executive of Air IT Group since December 2024, has repositioned the August Equity-backed SME specialist around automation and AI. The business relaunched its brand in October 2025, won Rewst’s Automation and AI Excellence Award in June 2026 for its in-house Neuron platform and launched AI services for SMEs in September. Its 2024 accounts show revenue up 10% to £68.9m, with 79% from recurring contracts. Air IT says it now supports more than 2,000 organizations.
Adam Williamson
Country Manager, UK, Exclusive Networks
Williamson took over Exclusive Networks’ UK business in late 2025 after 16 years at the distributor. In 2026 the UK operation signed Docker, became Rapid7’s strategic UK distributor and launched partner-resold penetration testing and assurance services with SecuraNova across eight Northern European markets. His push to sell services alongside products matters to UK cyber resellers and MSPs, which can buy in skills through distribution rather than build them.
Lisa Roberts
Senior Director, UKI & Northern Europe Channels, SentinelOne
Roberts led SentinelOne’s UK, Irish and Northern European partners through the move to PartnerOne, which took full effect in February 2026 with about 100 partners expected at elite level. SentinelOne passed $1bn in revenue in the year to January 2026, up 22%, and in April Softcat was named its EMEA partner of the year. She sets the terms on which SentinelOne’s UK partners earn margin under the new program.
Natalie Noor
UK&I Channel and SME Director, Lenovo
Under Noor, Lenovo relaunched its LEAP rewards program for partner sales and support staff and extended its MSP pathway, which it expects to pass $100m in global revenue this year, to the UK and Ireland in April 2026. As Lenovo’s group revenue rose 43% in the quarter to June, she stood out for a plain account of where AI was and wasn’t selling. For UK resellers, her channel is Lenovo’s route from hardware sales to services margin.
Emma Westland
Head of Channel, UK&I, Zoom
Promoted to head of Zoom’s UK and Ireland channel in spring 2026, less than two years after joining as strategic partners lead, Westland takes charge as Zoom’s UK data center goes live with more than 20 services for public sector and regulated buyers. She also leads partners through the overhauled Zoom Up program, as Zoom’s enterprise revenue grew 6.5% to $2.93bn last year. For UK resellers, she brings data residency to partner-led public sector deals.
Adrian Sunderland
CEO and Co-founder, Jola
Sunderland, chief executive since August 2023 and a co-founder of Jola, says the wholesale mobile data provider now serves more than 1,600 partners. In the past year it launched RoamNet 901 and RoamNet Blue Pay-per-Zone SIMs and battery-backed 4G routers aimed at the PSTN switch-off, and won the Comms Business Partner Accelerator award in July 2026. Jola lets MSPs and IT support firms add managed mobile connectivity without negotiating their own network deals.
Olya Scekaturova
Vice President of Regional Sales, UK and Ireland, Westcon-Comstor
Scekaturova joined Westcon-Comstor in July 2026 to lead its UK and Ireland sales operation as the Westcon and Comstor teams merged under one leader for the first time. She arrives from Black Box, Computacenter and Insight with a brief to move the distributor toward services and recurring revenue, which already make up 68% of its $5.74bn global gross sales. For UK partners, she will decide how a merged Westcon-Comstor sells to them.
Louise Mahrra
Marketing Director, CloudClevr
Mahrra joined CloudClevr as marketing director in March 2026 after its 18-month integration of four acquired businesses, a period in which the company says revenue grew 146% in FY25. She leads demand generation as the private equity-backed group returns to M&A: in September it bought Flow AI from SCC, adding about £8m of revenue and 90 staff. Her job is to present a group built from five businesses as one proposition.
Chloe Mann
Sales Manager, Elovade UK&I
Mann won GTIA’s 2026 UK & Ireland Future Leader Award after growing Brigantia’s sales team to 15 people and coaching the people in it. She is vice chair of GTIA’s women in technology interest group and is shortlisted for CRN’s 2026 Role Model of the Year (Vendor/Distributor). As Brigantia becomes Elovade UK&I, the people she has built up are the continuity the distributor has promised its MSP partners.
Ross Teague
CEO, Nebula Global Services
Teague founded Nebula Global Services in 2020 to sell field engineering and managed services to MSPs, resellers and vendors, and the company says it now delivers in more than 170 countries. In 2026 he added partnerships with networking vendor Meter and FinOps specialist Netos and hired Scott Lynn from Agilitas as global services director. Nebula says it won a CRN UK Channel Award in both 2024 and 2025. It serves partners that need engineers abroad without building their own teams there.
Martin Rutterford
Channel Director UK and Ireland, Check Point Software
Rutterford runs the UK and Ireland channel for a vendor that sells only through partners, more than 270 of them in the UK by his 2022 count. In March 2026 he hosted Check Point’s UK Partner Awards, where Softcat won three categories, and introduced the new Western Europe channel head. With security subscriptions up 12% in the second quarter and the vendor expanding sales capacity, UK partners are its route to customers.
Lynette Slater
Chief Executive, de Novo Solutions
Slater became chief executive of de Novo Solutions, a 150-person Oracle and ServiceNow partner in Newport, in September 2026, taking over from founder Mark Sweeny. She arrives from ICE Tech, where de Novo says she grew professional services revenue to £13m in 2025, and leads what Sweeny calls a “predominantly female executive team”. Sweeny stays on as executive chairman as Slater takes the business into its next stage.
Lauren McManus
Founder and Director, Electric Bloom
McManus left in-house channel marketing to launch Electric Bloom in July 2024, and in June 2026 marked two years of work for comms and IT channel firms, from campaigns and PR to award entries and event video. In 2026 she was shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year in CRN’s Women & Diversity in Channel Awards. Her agency sells in-house channel marketing experience to partners too small to employ it themselves.
Emily Masterton
Global Head of Channel, 8x8
Promoted to global head of channel at 8x8 in May 2026, Masterton launched a four-tier program for direct resellers in August that pays rebates for retaining and expanding customers, not only for new sales. It was piloted with partners including the UK’s Opus Technology. UK resellers Softcat and Wavenet were among its 2026 EMEA partner award winners. Paying for retention answers a common reseller complaint at a vendor with $735.8m (£550m) of annual revenue.
Silvia Lehnis
Chief AI Officer, UBDS Digital
Lehnis took the chief AI officer title at UBDS Digital by June 2026, having been its consulting director for data and AI. In September UBDS published a Claude deployment for Longmead Capital that the client estimates saves about 20% of catalog review time. She was shortlisted for CRN UK Woman of the Year in July. Her argument that agentic AI fails on skills and operating models gives other services partners a practical test for their own pilots.
Charlotte Shone
Director of Channel Sales, EMEA, Cyera
Shone has built Cyera’s UK partner bench since joining in September 2024, adding Bytes Software Services, which says Cyera named it EMEA partner of the year, and Logicalis UK&I in June 2026. Her remit now has money behind it: Cyera’s $400m (£299m) investment from Goldman Sachs in September is earmarked partly for EMEA growth. She is shortlisted for CRN Woman of the Year 2026. For UK resellers weighing a data security practice, she runs a partner route with fresh capital behind it.