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

… national channels covering the U.S. and Canada, and we sell to MSPs and CSPs. The 30 people among our distributors who we’ve trained and enabled are on the front line and taking calls and questions from all of those partner communities and they’re representing Trend Micro. I always tell people, “Imagine how many more people we’d have to hire at Trend Micro to do what our distributors do for us.”

CF: How have you seen those distributors evolve in terms of their capabilities and their ability to address the changing needs of the market?

JVN: Well, with their cloud marketplaces, most of the distributors let you go to their marketplace to acquire SaaS technologies. They’re integrated with us on their platform and our MSP program. The disties that were traditionally accustomed to on-prem deployments sales, have managed to do well and saw what was coming with SaaS and integrating with the SaaS vendors to make sure they delivered as well as they did on the on prem stuff.

CF: What’s your reaction to last month’s announcement that Apollo is acquiring Tech Data? 

JVN: Well, it’s been a year of acquisitions, that’s for sure. I was a bit surprised to see Tech Data being acquired. What’s interesting is that Tech Data acquired DLT. They announced that right before the announcement that they are being acquired. I’m excited to see how this plays out because DLT is a new federal distributor for us. We’ve had a good year with them, getting them enabled and ramped and driving with us. But with Tech Data acquiring them, they bring a big federal reach. So that’s going to be exciting to see what we can do with both DLT and Tech Data in that space in 2020. If you look at all the disty acquisitions just over the last few years, it’s getting very consolidated.

CF: And likewise, among the security players in the industry. What do you make of that some of the big players like Symantec and Sophos being acquired?

JVN: I see opportunities for other security vendors like Trend Micro, because we’ve been investing in significant innovation, like managed detection and response services. We’ve been investing in cloud security for workloads, containers, DevOps and hosted intrusion prevention systems like our Tipping Point product. I think it gives us an opportunity to show people that are not our customers what we’ve been investing in and what we’ve been doing with their journey to the cloud, with their demand for SaaS security solutions. It’s a good opportunity for us to get some of that spotlight.

CF: You alluded to Trend Micro’s newest offering, Cloud One. Can you discuss the go-to-market plan with that?

JVN: Obviously, SaaS is booming, we’ve seen significant growth every year, but we’ve been delivering SaaS solutions for many years and most of our solutions are already SaaS enabled. We have 1,500 MSPs today in the U.S. delivering our SaaS products. I think the decision by Trend Micro to focus…