Top Gun 51 Profile: Trend Micro’s Jeff Van Natter Sees Distributors as Key to Reaching New Partners

…thought it was going to be, so we’re excited about those results.

CF: How many of those 350 are now new Trend Micro partners?

JVN: A lot of them have joined our partner program. We’re going to do a recap at the end of the year to see who actually signed on to the program, but yes, many have.

CF: But regardless, they are now at the very least more on board with what our portfolio can bring to a certain customer sets?

JVN: That’s exactly right. They’re much more educated now on what we do and how we can help them and their customers. We’re going to do this in 2020 as well. But I think it’s vastly more powerful when you have that time with them on the phone. They’re not sitting there watching a webinar. They’re not reading an email. They’re actually one-on-one with the disty SE who’s recommending a product and showing them how the product will benefit their customer base.

CF: Were there any common threads that you observed in terms of what some of these partners had learned about Trend Micro?

JVN: We laugh because we always get this feedback: “No! You guys did that?” That’s generally the response we get. They’re pretty amazed about the technological innovation we’ve been delivering for the last several years, specifically around hybrid cloud, managed detection and response, which as you know is a big trend with customers these days. They have a ton of security data that they have to review, and they have to monitor all the threat analysis. With our new solution that we’ve been demonstrating to our VAR community, we now have managed detection and response where it’s a SaaS solution where you don’t have to run the software updates, Trend Micro does it for them. You don’t have to do your reporting, Trend Micro does it. You don’t have to sift through and mimic the mitigation of threats, Trend Micro does that for you and reports back. We’ve been able to communicate that not just traditionally through webinars and emails, but also through these demos to actually show the partner these capabilities.

CF: Which distributors played an active role in this?

JVN: Our four commercial distributors or Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Arrow and Interwork. And all four of them have Trend Micro-certified SEs.

CF: Given how close you personally have been involved with the distributor community, what’s your view on how the role of the distributor has changed and where do you see their role in the future?

JVN: I see them becoming even more important, not only from the traditional sense of quoting, crediting, billing and shipping but I think now, more than ever, with all of the new technology and products on the market and all the ways to consume those products, our distributors are the first point of contact for those thousands of reselling partners who need answers to the questions they have. Trend Micro sells to SMB-focused partners, enterprise partners, the…