Four Practices, One Company
How Telelink Business Services Is Organised for 2026
The IT services industry is in a pivotal moment.
AI is moving from a separate technology category into every kind of work. Infrastructure and cyber security are shifting decisively from on-premises models and traditional perimeter defence toward public cloud, hybrid architectures, and zero-trust security postures — with completely different requirements than what was standard even two or three years ago. Operational Technology — the systems that run plants, energy grids, utilities, and logistics — is opening up as a distinct domain that converges with IT but follows its own logic. And the role of the system integrator is shifting alongside all of this: clients increasingly need partners who can move at the speed of these changes, not vendors anchored to legacy approaches.
This month we have published a new organisational structure for Telelink Business Services that is built for this moment. This article explains the thinking behind it.
What we have learned about how this industry is changing
We have spent the last two years studying how the technology landscape is shifting in the regions we operate in and the markets we are entering. A few patterns are clear.
The boundary between cyber security and infrastructure is dissolving. Zero-trust, cloud security posture management, endpoint and network detection and response — these no longer sit as separate disciplines layered on top of an infrastructure stack. They live inside the stack. Treating them as two organisations produces duplicated work, contradictory advice to clients, and slower delivery. They need one home.
Hybrid infrastructure has become the new normal. The pure public-cloud-first story that dominated Western European thinking a few years ago has shifted — sovereignty, regulatory, and cost considerations have pushed many organisations back toward hybrid architectures that span on-premises, private cloud, and one or more public clouds. AI workloads accelerate this: teams want the ability to start with a small public-cloud proof of concept, scale up as the use case proves itself, and run fully on-premises when the requirements demand it. In our home region, public-cloud penetration was always lower than in the West, which makes hybrid a particularly natural fit. Clients increasingly expect a partner who can design and operate across all of this as one estate. The skill set itself is changing — what used to be a stack of distinct vendor competencies is becoming a discipline of platform engineering, automation, and security-by-default architecture.
AI delivery is its own discipline. AI engineering, data engineering, software development, and AI consulting share infrastructure with the rest of the technology stack, but the engagements, the team shapes, the project rhythms, and the buyer types are different. AI is not a feature of an infrastructure practice; it is a practice in its own right.
Operational Technology is converging with IT but is a distinct business. Plant managers, energy operators, and logistics directors are not the same buyers as CIOs and CISOs. The vendor ecosystem is different. The compliance landscape — IEC 62443, NIS2 in industrial contexts — is different. The delivery cadence is different. OT deserves its own practice, with leadership that understands the buyer and the technology together.
Business applications — ERP, CRM, line-of-business systems — sit at a different layer entirely. To grow with the corporate sector in our region, we need to be present at the application and business-process layer, not only at infrastructure and cyber security. This is a practice we are working hard to build.
How we are organised
Telelink Business Services is now organised around four practices, each led by a Practice Lead and a Service Lead working as a pair at group level. The Practice Lead owns the practice as a business — commercial direction, portfolio, pre-sales leadership, go-to-market. The Service Lead owns delivery — technical standards, processes, methodology, cross-country delivery quality. The two roles are designed to be complementary rather than hierarchical.
IT Infrastructure & Cyber Security is our largest practice, accounting for approximately 80% of group revenue. It operates in every country where we have a presence and covers the full infrastructure stack — networking, compute, storage, identity, endpoints, hybrid and multi-cloud platforms — together with the cyber security disciplines that now live inside the stack.
AI & Software Engineering brings AI engineering, data engineering, software development, and AI consulting under one practice. The long-term direction is for the boundary between data, AI, and software development to dissolve, with the best person available chosen for each engagement regardless of label.
Advanced OT Solutions addresses the IT/OT convergence opportunity. It covers OT assessment, data collection and control architectures, monitoring and observability, and edge capabilities — including the more advanced end of the field, where computer vision, autonomous systems, and physical-world AI agents are emerging.
Business Applications is a practice we are hoping to build through acquisition, and a piece of work we are pursuing with focus and energy. We see a real opportunity across our region to serve the corporate market with a full enterprise applications capability, and the acquisitions in our pipeline are aimed at giving us the foundation to grow into a complete practice over the years that follow.
Across the four practices sit horizontal functions that serve every practice: Operations, Field Services, Bid Management, Delivery Management, Partnership Management, and Logistics, Warehouse & Procurement. Internal Technology & Systems handles our own platforms and internal systems. TBS Academy runs internal training, external education partnerships, and the Talent Accelerator — a structured curriculum that develops engineers into delivery-ready professionals over approximately twelve months.
Governance, Risk and Compliance maintains an integrated portfolio of standards across all entities (multiple ISO standards, TISAX, with SOC 2 and CREST in progress), and is preparing the company for NIS2, CSRD, and EU AI Act compliance as part of our Western European expansion.
Geographically, we are headquartered in Bulgaria and operate across Eastern Europe — Bulgaria, Croatia, Serbia, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Herzegovina — with active expansion into Western Europe.
How we think about people
Two ideas shape how we run TBS as a company.
The first is one company. We operate across several countries and several practices, but we run as one organisation. When something difficult comes up — an emergency for a client, an unusual technical problem, an opportunity that needs cross-domain expertise — anyone in the company, wherever they normally sit, can be asked to step in and help. It is the privilege and the cost of being one company across departments and countries, and it is one of the reasons people stay at TBS for many years.
The second is the five sides of a TBS employee. We think of each person at TBS as a gem with several sides. Seniority. Professional type. Skills. Profile of work. Roles. Each side captures something different about who someone is and how they contribute, and together they describe the whole person. Departments are placements, not definitions. This shapes how we hire, how we develop our people, and how we let careers evolve across domains, technologies, and countries.
What this means in practice
For clients, the change means clearer single-point accountability for any engagement, with a domain-deep team engaging from pre-sales through delivery. For technology partners and vendors, it means a clearer counterpart for each domain and a structured partnership-management function. For potential acquisition targets — particularly in Western Europe and in business applications — it means an organisation set up to absorb new entities cleanly, with defined practices, roles, and operating principles that an acquired team can plug into without losing its identity.
For our own people, it means clarity of role, defined paths into practice and service leadership, and an Academy investment that connects ambition to opportunity.
Underpinning all of this is a deliberate design choice: scale. The new structure — the practice model, the horizontal functions, the country-versus-group split, the role glossary that applies the same way in a five-person team and a fifty-person team — is built so that as the company grows through hiring, acquisitions, and new countries, the operating model holds together rather than fragmenting. Building for scale is one of the structural design goals, not an afterthought.
What’s next
We continue to grow our teams in the areas where demand is moving fastest — AI engineering, cloud and platform engineering, cyber security, and OT solutions. Our presence in Bulgaria and Croatia is the strongest, with expanding capacity in our Western European markets as those operations take shape.
We are also actively building partnerships — with technology vendors whose ecosystems align with the practices, with channel partners across the markets we operate in, and with acquisition candidates in markets and segments where we are growing.
If you are interested in working with us, joining us, or talking to us about a partnership, we would like to hear from you.
