Malwarebytes’ Mike LaPeters: Convergence, Unity Fuel New Channel Strategy

Malwarebytes, the developer of endpoint protection and remediation solutions, plans to roll out a new, unified partner program and channel strategy that emphasizes convergence and opportunities for managed services.

That’s according to Mike LaPeters, who left AT&T Cybersecurity nearly two months ago to head up channels at Malwarebytes as vice president of worldwide MSP and channel operations.

LaPeters is part of Channel Partners’ Top Gun 51, which recognizes a new generation of channel executives, those who build and execute programs in a way that drives partner, customer and supplier success. The Top Gun 51 were recognized at Channel Partners Evolution in Washington, D.C.

Malwarebytes’ team of researchers and security experts provide protection to more than 60,000 businesses and millions of people globally, combating more than 8.8 million threats daily using AI and machine learning.

Malwarebytes’ Mike LaPeters

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, LaPeters talks about what partners can expect to see in the coming months leading up to Malwarebytes’ fiscal 2021.

Channel Futures: What have you been up to since joining Malwarebytes?

Mike LaPeters: It’s been about seven weeks now since I joined and my goal was to sink my teeth into two different sides of the business. The first is the MSP side. Obviously with the fact that MSP is in my title means that’s going to be a focused component of my business. The second side is … really understanding how we go to market globally with our partner communities. So my focus has been on a couple of things. First is really bringing together all the disparate ways we go to market and help our customers be secure, and bringing them all into one umbrella approach to the customer community.

Here’s the challenge that I think we face in today’s world: The lines are blurring between partner types. So resellers are all exploring the idea of offering technology as a service — so service providers. Technicians are looking at it and saying, “How do I move into the services space? Or do I just resell product?” Distributors are acting as aggregators or classic distributors. And resellers are building out strategic relationships. So one of the biggest things I’m focused on now is ensuring that our partner programs are able to address partners in whatever way they feel they need to support their customer community, so really globalization and integration of our partner programs.

The second thing I’m working on right now … is the MSP space. We have launched in the MSP world a product called OneView. That’s a really solid, centralized view of how the customers are leveraging the Malwarebytes technology through the partner. But what we haven’t done is we haven’t globalized our program and also added in some of those benefits that you get for engaging with us building out your customer base. So we’re really building in some of that requirement-based and benefit-based programmatic structure around this program.

And the third thing I’m working on is built around enablement. We have uncovered a lot of area that we can grow in helping our partners be successful. So it’s more than just teaching them how to leverage Malwarebytes to help their customers be secure, but it’s about …