CPX 360 2023: Check Point Unveils New Tools, 'Level Up' Strategy
The company is in the process of recruiting a global channel chief following Frank Rauch's departure.
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Check Point’s Geoff Waters said from a product perspective, his company is announcing its three C’s concept: comprehensive, consolidated and collaborative.
“From a comprehensive perspective, we’re announcing the fact that we’re going to extend a lot of our security offerings,” he said. “It’s leveling up beyond just the firewall. We’re the undisputed king of firewall. So the comprehensive part is we’re announcing a new, incremental cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP). It’s unifying cloud security, merging deeper security insights and prioritizing risk prevention of attacks. We’re going to further extend our CloudGuard product set. And we’re introducing something called Check Point Infinity Spark. Infinity is the entire enterprise-grade email, Harmony, cloud and quantum, one overarching umbrella into one single pane of glass. So Spark is our SMB product. We’re going to have an Infinity model for SMBs. It’s bringing email, endpoint, mobile, network and industry-leading threat prevention, and integrating that all together.”
Quantum SD-WAN gets Check Point into that SD-WAN space and extends security in connectivity into a single appliance, Waters said. And XDR/XPR introduces prevention response, Waters said.
Infinity represents a consolidated, collaborative approach that is going to “allow us to to protect everything,” Waters said.
Check Point’s 2023 security report shows the average organization is going to experience more than 1,100 attacks per week, Waters said.
“Cloud attacks are up almost 50%,” he said. “Health care is the No. 1 most attacked industry. If you then extract that to the partners, every single one of those communities, the partners have customers with. And so we’ve got to level up our protection for all of those industries. In essence, the cyberattacks are just getting more and more common. So it’s really leveling up our partner ecosystem to ensure that they’re ready for those attacks with the three C’s.”
Check Point has doubled down on its investment and overall engagement with partners, Waters said.
“Last year, our partner community grew 78% in transacting partners, so there’s huge growth there,” he said. “And we had 15% more sellers within those partners. The main thing we did to help drive that is, we engaged our partners. We went back to basics. We called our partners. I told every single one of my field people every single day, you have a partner call. When I first joined, I would talk to some of the salespeople and say, ‘How’s the partner stuff going?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, we don’t always get a lot of value from them.’ And I think that was the wrong mindset. The mindset is you build those relationships. And you’re not necessarily going to get something from a partner every single day, but you’re going to start cycles with them and you’re going to end cycles with them.”
During CPX 360, Check Point is announcing a new customer rebate. A massive focus for Check Point is going to be around driving selling beyond the firewall, Waters said.
“This is around driving new business,” he said. “We’ve got endpoint, security access, email and cloud. And we’ve got this great install base globally of 100,000 customers. So we’ll continue to sell firewall in there and do those renewals, and everything that our customers expect. But we need to sell new business; we need to bring in new customers.
So we’re extending our internal compensation models to focus more on new business. We’re creating a couple of buckets where they’re going to continue to focus on the network and renewals, but you’re going to see more and more emphasis on our internal compensation plans to ensure that we go beyond the firewall. And at the same time we’re doing the same thing with our partners. So we’re going to be offering them more rebates for new customers and growth pillars.”
With the current macroenvironment, a lot of customers are laying off employees and are facing pressure on budgets, Waters said. They’re still spending on cybersecurity, but there is increasing pressure to consolidate vendors.
“When I talk to CISOs, one of the new things that I’m hearing them talk about is vendor consolidation,” he said. “It’s going to reduce overall total cost of ownership. So absolutely, our partners are asking for this. I think our consolidated approach and single pane of glass is really starting to kind of come to fruition. You put it all in a wrapper around Infinity and you start reducing the total number of vendors, you’re consolidating to one single pane of glass. It’s easier on the people, the training and the policies. So we were absolutely hearing this from our partners as well.”
Partners can take the three C’s concept with them and use it to drive business with their customers, Waters said.
“I want them to be able to pitch the Check Point joint vision around us being this comprehensive solution that is providing qualitative advantage using 40 artificial intelligence (AI) engines across the overall architecture. This is through preventive controls. The second one is around the consolidated solution. This is around the single pane that allows you to manage all those different pieces, the cloud, endpoint access and then the network. And then finally the collaboration — that’s the threat intelligence cloud, the AI and the engine that runs it all. So if we want anything to resonate with them, it would be the three C’s.”
Check Point also has announced its CPX 360 Americas Partner Awards.
The recipients are:
New Business Partner — GuidePoint Security
Cloud Partner of the Year — Compuquip
Harmony Partner of the Year — CDW
GSI Partner of the Year — Kyndryl
Service Provider Partner of the Year — Verizon
Distributor Partner of the Year — TD Synnex Canada
Canadian Partner of the Year — MNP
Latin American Partner of the Year — Soluciones Seguras
Americas Partner of the Year — World Wide Technology
Check Point also has announced its CPX 360 Americas Partner Awards.
The recipients are:
New Business Partner — GuidePoint Security
Cloud Partner of the Year — Compuquip
Harmony Partner of the Year — CDW
GSI Partner of the Year — Kyndryl
Service Provider Partner of the Year — Verizon
Distributor Partner of the Year — TD Synnex Canada
Canadian Partner of the Year — MNP
Latin American Partner of the Year — Soluciones Seguras
Americas Partner of the Year — World Wide Technology
CHECK POINT CPX 360 — Check Point Software Technologies kicked off this week’s CPX 360 2023 by unveiling its new Quantum SD-WAN and Extended Cyber Attack Prevention Platform for network, email and endpoints.
Instead of taking place in one location, CPX 360 is happening simultaneously in several cities and virtually.
Geoff Waters is Check Point’s president of Americas sales. The company is in the process of recruiting a global channel chief following Frank Rauch’s departure.
Check Point’s Geoff Waters
“CPX 360 is all around leveling-up and it’s around customer-first, it’s around customer engagement, understanding what their priorities are, and then putting that in our portfolio and driving better security results for our customers,” Waters said. “So it really starts with our customers, leveling up … to our customers. The second thing is around our partners. There’s a big concept around ensuring that you start a sales cycle with a partner and you’re going to end a sales cycle with a partner. So making sure that we have a one-team concept across our salespeople as well as our partners.”
Focusing On Prevention
Quantum SD-WAN protects branch offices with next-generation threat prevention and optimized connectivity. It combines security with optimized network and internet connectivity as part of a complete security and internet access solution managed from the Check Point Infinity cloud platform.
Check Point Horizon Extended Detection and Response/Extended Prevention and Response (XDR/XPR) detects and stops known and zero-day threats across email, cloud, networks and endpoints.
Also during CPX 360, Check Point is releasing its 2023 security report. The report shows an increase in cyberattacks and the rise of “disruption and destruction” malware. Overall, global cyberattacks increased by 38% in 2022 compared to 2021, with an average of 1,168 weekly attacks per organization. This was driven in part by smaller, more agile hackers and ransomware groups. They’re exploiting the legitimate collaboration tools that have become commonplace in the hybrid workplace.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Check Point CPX 360.
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