Microsoft Partner Rebrands As TrustedTech As It Expands AI, IT Modernization Push

“We really wanted to focus on being an extension of customers’ internal teams and helping them trust in the decisions that we’re making together. As we’ve continued to mature, not only in revenue but also in regard to the size of companies we work for, we wanted the brand to be focused on ‘trust the tech’ you have in-house while working with our team here,” says TrustedTech founder Julian Hamood.

For Irvine, Calif.-based Microsoft-focused cloud and IT services provider that until this week was known as Trusted Tech Team, what’s in a name has a powerful connotation.

Julian Hamood (pictured), founder of the company that this week rebranded itself as TrustedTech, said the decision to change the name came down to how it wanted customers to think about its partnership with them.

The company, which since its founding in 2017 has become a major player in the Microsoft licensing ecosystem, wants customers to focus on the technology they and the solution provider develop together, and not just on its team alone, Hamood told CRN.

“We really want customers to focus on just trusting the technology they engage in-house, whether that’s AI, the data, the SQL licensing, or the way Azure is connecting with their on-premises hardware,” he said. “So we’re dropping the ‘team.’ Trust your technology, rather than we’re your trusted technology team.”

There’s a lot going on at TrustedTech beyond the name change, including a big international expansion push and adding to its Microsoft-focused offerings for customers. Here is what else Hamood had to say in his interview with CRN.

Talk about TrustedTech, formerly known as Trusted Tech Team. How do you describe the company?

I founded the company in 2017 because there was nowhere online or no partners who could assist in understanding the ins and outs of Microsoft licensing, and I ended up putting together information relating to a lot of the technical deficiencies of the Microsoft guidelines for how to license the environment correctly. As time progressed and the company progressed, not only in terms of staff but also revenue, we ended up moving to the cloud. We took the base foundation of understanding the licensing into the cloud environment in relation to how to license employees, how to license cloud environments, how to save money, and really how to utilize the base-level tutorials that Microsoft puts in.

Over the last nine years, we've moved to a prominent position with Microsoft. We are in the top 1 percent of the company’s 400,000 partners globally in terms of revenue and size of the companies we work with. We typically target companies in the range of 250 to 5,000 employees. We also work with Fortune 50 companies and Nasdaq 50 companies with tens of thousands of employees. [We focus on] understanding the customers’ environments and what they’re looking to do as they move forward, whether it’s growth or downsizing, and ensuring the technology is there to back them up and also ensuring that they’re able to really stay ahead of the curve as it relates to structuring their data for AI and to be able to point different agents at that data. We help formulate what companies are looking for in regard to the next phase of growth, whether that’s a billion-dollar company growing to $10 billion, or a $15 million company moving to $100 million in revenue.

What kinds of Microsoft licenses are you talking about?

Microsoft essentially makes a volume of different commercial products which are typically installed locally, on-premises and on the cloud, and typically you’re connecting that licensing together. Why we really started the company, and it’s still a major foundation of what we do now, is not only being able to license the products correctly. We have Windows 11 on desktops, but when you actually span to commercial entities, you have hundreds of users connecting into an environment. They’re typing in first and last name; they’re logging into the environment. All that requires a license to be able to access the environment and then also track it as well. That spans to even the database license side. Take Marriott Hotels, for instance. They have 7,000 hotels, and they need to maintain customer data so that when ‘Joseph’ logs into his Marriott Bonvoy account, he has access to his orders, his stays, his points. All of that information is stored in an SQL database, and we get all the licensing for that as well. It’s extremely complex. You license it based on the user. You license it based on the environment as well. So really, we have the technical ability on how to license it and making it really ‘cookie cutter’ for customers. It’s still what we do today on the cloud side as well.

And this extends also to Windows on PC licenses?

Everything from a user logging into their work computer to a U.S. employee overseas working six months a year in Singapore. They need to access data relating to your customer data, for example.

The question comes up because of the big push to move users to Windows 11 as Microsoft moves to end-of-life Windows 10. What are some of the licensing issues that you see businesses looking for as they migrate to Windows 11?

Most of the commercial customers we’re working with now are already on Windows 11. The biggest marker, I think, for what’s going on now is how to structure all the data relating to everything that’s being stored and keeping that data very nice and clean for AI. Customers have hundreds of thousands of gigabytes or terabytes of data, and they’re moving all that data into Azure, and it’s pretty much spread everywhere throughout the environment. Their IT directors may be spending $2.5 million this year and planning to spend $5 million next year in regard to AI agents to really help the business grow.

[Customers’] data is everywhere. They can’t make AI agents point at everything. They really need help consolidating that data so they can start creating different agents that start subsidizing some of their employee time or subsidizing their employee numbers. That’s the really big movement in the industry right now, outside of earlier this year when AI terminology was thrown everywhere. We see a lot of customers spending large sums of money really just consolidating their data, and from there we’ll help them point the agents.

Then why change the name to TrustedTech, given that it's already pretty close to your original name, Trusted Tech Team?

We really wanted to focus on being an extension of customers’ internal teams and helping them trust in the decisions that we’re making together. As we’ve continued to mature, not only in revenue but also in regard to the size of companies we work for, we wanted the brand to be focused on ‘trust the tech’ you have in-house while working with our team here. We noticed a lot of different customers come to us with the belief that they’re doing things the right way. And when we find a 5,000-employee company with the internal technologies of an 800-employee company, they’re really not ready for that next phase of growth. We really want customers to focus on just trusting the technology they engage in in-house, whether that’s AI, the data, the SQL licensing, or the way Azure is connecting with their on-premises hardware. So we’re dropping the ‘team.’ Trust your technology, rather than we’re your trusted technology team.

Does TrustedTech work exclusively in Microsoft environments?

We work with a volume of different providers, including Amazon and Google. A heavy, heavy majority of our revenue is in the Microsoft ecosystem, and we’ve really focused and pride ourselves on hiring the best industry experts as it relates to Microsoft.

We’re coming here close to the end of 2025. What are some of your strategic parties for the remainder of this year and into the next?

In addition to the TrustedTech naming revision, we’re really improving our focus on the next phase of growth here, not only as it relates to customers’ experience, but really to what Microsoft’s goals and expectations are as it relates to AI, to security and to full cloud environments. We’re looking at how we can improve the training of our team internally. I think we’re substantially above the market in regard to the knowledge we have regarding the changes that are coming. But Microsoft is just a behemoth, and every three months makes so many different changes, and we focused really on being nimble enough to continue to make those changes as it relates to anything that’s pressing. The big one now is there’s hundreds and hundreds of agents that have been created in the marketplace, and we’re focused on getting a good grasp on the benefit of each of these agents.

How is the business environment looking for the rest of this year?

We have our U.S. office in Irvine, California. Our U.K. operation now is going on almost three years of growth. We’re actually expanding into the UAE to really service the Middle East, which market data and what Microsoft has presented to us shows a large potential for expansion. We believe they're a few years behind the U.S. market. [But] yes, pedal down on that expansion, and then further expand into Singapore and India in the next 24 months.

Are those all organic expansions, or do you plan to make any international acquisitions?

Our UAE expansion is going to be organic. We are looking for a multitude of different acquisitions as [they relate] to domestic and offshore expansion. Those are all coming to plan, especially in the Singapore and India market where we have boots on the ground and are looking at acquisitions. TrustedTech has been built on organic growth since the start. That’s something we really pride ourselves on. We want a fresh take on what’s going on instead of looking at what someone else has done really, really well. So, yes, we’re still focusing on bread-and-butter domestic growth, international growth, offshore growth, all organically.

Who owns TrustedTech?

No private equity, no outside investment, no debt on the company. All those factors come into play when it comes to just being really nimble. I think that’s one of our cores, especially with the naming convention. We really wanted to be as nimble as possible with how rapidly the changes relating to Microsoft and AI are occurring, and we believed that the best way to do that was to, No. 1, grow organically, and No. 2, not really be influenced by private equity or be beholden to a stakeholder.

With the change name, will TrustedTech keep its original URL, trustedtechteam.com, or will that also change?

The trustedtechteam.com domain is a primary for now, with revisions going into next year to modify that to trustedtech.com. There’s a lot that goes into the naming convention as it relates to the domain. Of course, especially with search authority, our customers are familiar with our brand name. We have over 6,000 customers working with us on a monthly recurring basis, and hundreds of thousands of customers working with us on a one-off basis. So we’re keeping the domain unchanged for now, with the domain modification occurring some point next year. We’re not really trying to rush that.

Does anyone else own trustedtech.com?

No, we own it as well. We’re really just changing the identity of the organization. I think the Trusted Tech Team name worked for us for so long, but as we expanded to more of a global organization and expanded our employee count, it just made much more sense to modify the name based on what we’ve seen in the marketplace of people really trusting us with large IT decisions.