AT&T Cybersecurity Poised to Help MSSPs

AT&T Cybersecurity plans to help partners increase their security services capabilities because “everybody wants to be an MSSP.”

That’s according to Mike LaPeters, AT&T Cybersecurity’s vice president of global channel sales. AlienVault has combined with AT&T cybersecurity consulting and AT&T managed security services to form the new division.

AT&T’s acquisition of AlienVault was announced last summer and was finalized last fall. The division is led by Barmak Meftah, president of AT&T Cybersecurity and former CEO of AlienVault.

“By abstracting much of the management of individual security products, we are automating deployment and ongoing operations, and operating them as a single unified solution — much in the same way AlienVault had done with the critical capabilities required for threat detection and response,” Meftah said in his recent blog unveiling the new division. “This platform will use the technical capabilities and reach of AT&T’s edge-to-edge intelligence in order to deliver solutions as on-demand digital services optimized to help protect customers through their own digital transformation journey.”

Earlier this month, AT&T announced it has joined the Global Telco Security Alliance launched by Singtel, Etisalat, Softbank and Telefónica. It is made up of global telco operators that provide enterprises with insights to address cybersecurity issues.

AT&T Cybersecurity’s Mike LaPeters

In a Q&A with Channel Futures’ MSSP Insider, LaPeters talks about AT&T Cybersecurity’s plans to provide partners with more managed service opportunities, and how little has changed in terms of channel leadership and direction.

Channel Futures’ MSSP Insider: What went into the process of integrating AT&T and AlienVault?

Mike LaPeters: When we actually launched the organization, there was an enormous amount of effort to understand how go-to-market strategies have worked in the past for AT&T Business because security was never a business unit for AT&T; it was technology that was offered and available through the AT&T Business organization. So the biggest piece that happened over that time period was setting up the management structure … and three quarters of them are legacy AlienVault. So from our perspective, an AlienVault perspective, this leads to a really solid grounding on how we’re going to go to market as an organization and that it’s going to have a lot of flavor of AlienVault to it. And as the guy who’s responsible for indirect for AlienVault, that’s pretty exciting for me because channels are such a significant part of the AlienVault DNA and that’s transitioning to this as well.

The good news from my perspective is not much changed in my organization because we’re continuing to offer and make available our technology for resell, our technology as the managed service, and then working closely with …