Atrion Becomes One Of Ingram Micro's Top Channel Partners By Focusing On Security, Professional Services

For the past few years, Atrion Communication Resources has made a commitment to expanding and investing in its professional services offerings, and that has caught the eye of Ingram Micro.

Atrion, a security-focused solution provider, joined the IT distribution giant's respected TrustX Alliance community this month after seeing its professional services revenue double in 2017. The Branchburg, N.J.-based company provides security program management, penetration testing and vulnerability assessment, among other services, while partnering with top tech vendors such as Juniper, Symantec and Fortinet.

"We bring a lot of value to organizations that may have cloud practices or be focused on servers and software, managed services or even Microsoft," Atrion President Dom Grillo (pictured) told CRN. "We have a completely different set of offerings, so it's a valuable opportunity for those member organizations to take advantage of what we do."

[Related: Atrion CEO: Larger Competitors Don't Have Our Professional Services 'Breadth']

Atrion began revamping its professional services offerings in 2015, Grillo said, after hiring David Magee as its chief technology officer. Magee brought more than 20 years of end-user IT experience to Atrion and had been one of its clients for a decade while under the CIO at Telerx Marketing.

Grillo credited Magee and the changes he enacted for shaping Atrion's services business into the strength it has become today. He added that Ingram Micro, a longtime distribution partner of Atrion, has come to know the solution provider as a professional services expert following that strategic shift.

"It changed the story and really helped us talk to customers at a different level because he has experience running large organizations on the customer side," Grillo said. "It helps to open up conversations with our customers and helps them see us in a different light."

Grillo, who now oversees Atrion's day-to-day operations under his father, Atrion's CEO and founder Pat Grillo. The elder Grillo's business motto is the title of Michale Bandley and Elizabeth Kearney's 1990 book, "Customers Run Your Company: They Pay The Bills!" And from Dom Grillo's perspective, the customer – particularly midmarket companies – are in serious need of security services.

Some of those businesses, he said, might have only a couple of employees running IT for the entire company.

"They might be the first ones to figure out how to hook up a printer. All of a sudden they became the network engineer, and then suddenly they're in security and trying to run security for a 1,000-person organization," Grillo said. "For us to come in with the expertise we have, [there's] the opportunity to work with so many different clients. We can help tailor programs for them, build policies and procedures, align them against different standards and then provide the tactical work like testing. See what the efficacy is currently and help them build that roadmap going forward."

The TrustX Alliance enables more than 300 top regional Ingram Micro partners to collaborate by sharing best practices and solution-selling strategies.