Stuart Marginson, Managing Director of Highgate IT Solutions, has been featured in Partner Leaders 2026, a report from IT Channel Oxygen that profiles 75 of the UK IT channel's CEOs and managing directors. Produced in association with Giacom, the report puts the same set of questions to every leader to build a picture of what running a UK IT partner actually involves in 2026.
Stuart is listed alongside the people running some of the largest names in the channel, including Computacenter, Softcat, SCC, Bytes Technology Group, Trustmarque Ultima, Redcentric and Natilik. For a self-funded business founded in 2010 and grown from £10m to £31m in revenue, sharing those pages says something about the company Highgate now keeps.
Partner Leaders 2026 is a new report from IT Channel Oxygen, edited by Doug Woodburn and produced in association with Giacom. Its editor describes the 75 featured leaders as the people who shape where UK organisations place their technology bets. Each answered the same quickfire questions, covering business high points, what keeps them awake at night, and how they expect the channel to change over the next five years.
AI runs through the report as the dominant theme. Many of the leaders predict accelerating consolidation, a shift from selling products to selling outcomes, and businesses treating technology as a board-level priority rather than an afterthought.
The report mixes the serious with the personal. Asked what his warning label would say, Stuart offered “Beware, unfiltered northerner”, a reminder that these profiles are as interested in the people as the businesses they run.
Asked directly whether AI is over-hyped, Stuart was clear that it is not. “As with many emerging technologies there's plenty of hype around the edges, yet the underlying impact is real,” he said. “It will reshape how businesses operate over the next decade and beyond.”
His prediction for the next five years was less about technology and more about people. As AI makes products and services look more alike, he expects trust, reputation and long-term relationships to matter more, not less. “I think, and hope, human relationships will become more important as technology becomes increasingly automated,” he said.
That view sits at the centre of how Highgate defines itself: the IT partner UK businesses trust to reduce their risk, improve their efficiency and enable their growth. Not the biggest name in the market, the most trusted one.
Highgate does not wait for customers to test new technology first. Its most successful internal AI project to date has been automating the processing of inbound invoices, a system that now matches around 95% of them automatically and frees the finance team for higher-value work. Stuart also names large language models as the tool he would struggle to work without, using them to research, analyse and learn more quickly.
The approach mirrors how Highgate treats the technology it recommends to customers. Run it in the business first, learn where it helps and where it does not, then advise from experience rather than theory. Among his peers, Stuart singled out Nvidia's Jensen Huang as the tech figure who impressed him most this year, praising a willingness to invest years ahead of demand.
Asked what Highgate wanted to achieve in 2026, Stuart named ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certification. “We've always focused on quality and security,” he said, “and formalising those standards is the next logical step in our growth.”
Highgate has since achieved both, confirmed in July 2026. ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security management; ISO 9001 is the international standard for quality management. Held together with Cyber Essentials Plus, they give customers independent, audited assurance rather than a promise. It is the difference between a provider that says it takes security and quality seriously and one that can prove it.
This is the foundation of our work to reduce risk for the businesses we support, across both cybersecurity services and managed IT services.
Businesses rarely stay with an IT partner for years because of a single product. They stay because the relationship holds when something goes wrong. That thread runs through every one of Stuart's answers, and it is the same reason Highgate now supports more than 2,500 UK businesses while holding on to the culture that put it fourth in the UK's Best Place to Work rankings.
Being named among the UK channel's partner leaders is recognition of that direction, not a change of it. If you are weighing up whether your current IT partner is the right one for where your business is heading, we are happy to set out how we would approach it. Speak to the team at enquiries@highgate-it.co.uk or call 0300 140 0000.
You can read Stuart's full profile in Partner Leaders 2026 on the IT Channel Oxygen website.
