CRN 2025 | AN INTERVIEW WITH OUR CRO, JAMES CONNELLY

*This article was originally published on CRN UK.

James joined Harbor just over a year ago from Rubrik, where he played a key role in building the UK business over six successful years. With a career that spans pre-sales, cloud leadership, and sales leadership roles at Rubrik, Microsoft, and Dimension Data, James brings extensive industry expertise and a strong track record of growth. As CRO at Harbor, he continues to advocate for innovation in the channel. His leadership has been crucial to Harbor’s recent momentum, including its shortlisting for the CRN Sales and Marketing Awards – a testament to his focus on driving impact and expansion.

Why do you think Sales and Marketing Awards matter?

At Harbor, we are a channel-focused organisation and work with some of the UK’s largest resellers. Sales and Marketing are the lifeblood of the business. If we are winning awards in this space, it shows we are on the right path to growth and success.

These awards demonstrate credibility, integrity and authenticity, which are central to our go-to-market approach. In a channel-led model, recognition like this builds trust with customers, resellers and vendor partners alike. According to LinkedIn’s B2B Marketing Benchmark 2024, 68 percent of B2B buyers say brand reputation, validated through third-party recognition, influences purchasing decisions.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

Award recognition is vital as we continue to scale and grow. It validates the work we are doing across the channel and demonstrates the value we provide through our partnerships.

This award would raise our profile in the channel community and help us strengthen our brand within that ecosystem. IDC’s 2023 Partner Success Report states that award-winning companies are three times more likely to be shortlisted by partners and procurement teams.

Internally, it also matters. Gallup research shows that recognition has a positive impact on morale, which in turn supports long-term performance.

What would you say is your company’s proudest achievement over the past year?

There have been several. Over the past year, Harbor has once again doubled our top-line revenue, significantly ahead of the EMEA managed services market average of 12 percent growth (Canalys).

We were also named Rubrik’s Global MSP of the Year for 2024, a fantastic recognition from one of our key vendor partners.

Our customer retention remains above 95 percent, which reflects the value of our services. We have launched new managed and professional services to market, opened a new office in Australia to serve the ANZ region, launched our internal Culture Code, and closed over 40 new logos in the UK. We are proud of both the commercial and cultural progress made this year.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2024 so far and how have you overcome them?

Ransomware has been a key challenge. Attacks increased by 95 percent year-on-year in Q1 2024 (Check Point Research), and the complexity of these incidents is growing, especially across hybrid cloud environments.

Many organisations are trying to drive transformation while also protecting their most critical asset: data. We have invested in developing assessment services that do 80 percent of the heavy lifting upfront. This gives customers clarity on their current protection posture and allows us to build a roadmap with them.

Our 24/7 response capability and SLA-backed recovery services give customers confidence that they can recover, even in worst-case scenarios.

How have your people helped with that?

Our people are central to our success. They have built our reputation in the market as one of the leading data protection and cyber recovery specialists.

Our global operational teams consistently deliver when customers are in crisis. Integrity is at the core of our culture. We always put the customer first and do the right thing, even when it comes at a cost to us.

We have developed strong assessment services to help our channel partners build trust with their customers. We have also invested in hiring people who reflect our culture – people who “promise it, do it.” Every voice at Harbor is valued and contributes to unlocking our collective genius.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year, and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

After a tough few years following the pandemic, we have seen a recovery in channel budgets, particularly in cybersecurity and data protection, which is positive for organisations like Harbor.

We are seeing a shift towards a more consultative approach, with less emphasis on backing a single vendor and more focus on what is right for the customer.

The market is moving from generalists to specialists, especially in areas like cyber recovery. Larger channel players are beginning to act like vendors in their own right, partnering with specialists like us to drive strong customer outcomes. IDC forecasts a 17 percent increase in partner-led services in 2025, which reflects this shift.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year?

There is growing demand for specialism in areas like cyber resiliency and AI. Customers are moving beyond prevention towards recovery, with a greater focus on data sets and identity.

AI brings a huge opportunity, but the underlying data must be secure. If it is compromised, so is the AI output.

We also see demand growing for outcome-based services. McKinsey reports that over 60 percent of enterprise IT budgets in 2025 will go to as-a-service models.

Compliance is also a major opportunity. As frameworks like GDPR, NIS2 and DORA evolve, customers need support with documentation and adherence.

In addition, we see growth in areas like Talent-as-a-Service – offering roles like virtual CISOs – and ESG-related services such as support for SECR reporting.

How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

Our mission at Harbor is to provide peace of mind in a secure, data-smart world. Our expertise in identity, cloud and SaaS data protection ensures that our customers can protect their most critical assets and stay operational.

We offer outcome-based services backed by SLAs, giving organisations certainty around recoverability. We are seeing strong uptake of our assessment services, which help customers understand their data footprint and build out a maturity plan.

We are also expanding our compliance-related services, which are already delivering value to several existing customers, and we plan to offer them to a broader set of partners and prospects.

What are the most popular tech trends you are seeing in business today?

The adoption of AI continues to grow as organisations explore how it can improve operations and productivity.

Security remains a key area of investment, but we are seeing a shift in focus from prevention to recovery, especially as breaches become more inevitable.

Customers are continuing to embrace the cloud, but in many cases, data protection, disaster recovery and cyber recovery are still an afterthought for workloads that move into those environments. We expect data protection in the cloud to remain a key talking point as organisations navigate increasingly complex infrastructure and compliance demands.