Customers’ Needs From Partners

CF: What are customers looking for from their partners?

LM: We had a customer who’s a large online retailer. And a year went by and the partner went in and said, “OK, your renewal is this much plus X percent upcharge.” Unbeknownst to us and that partner, in that customer’s environment was one of these cloud-based partners. They were really strong in AWS skills. They didn’t realize what was going on in there. They looked at this and [said], “Wait a second, this isn’t configured, this isn’t secured. You need to tighten this up.” So what could have been a traditional renewal actually became a very large, brand-new enterprise deal because they recognized that it’s not simply about a renewal. It’s about looking at that infrastructure and where that end customer is doing business, and how they’re managing all their different systems, endpoints and networks. It’s a complicated business. So what are they looking for? They’re looking for that expertise, that knowledge, and not just going in at the end of the year saying, “Hey, I’m going to renew your license,” but “Hey, I’m going to add value. I’m going to show you where you’re not secure and we’re going to work on this together. It really is a community effort to make sure we’re all secure because I might shop at this online retailer. You don’t want your information exposed, whether it be at a retailer or whatever it is. We’ve got to be all in this together.

JC: We’ve seen a huge amount of growth in our MSP partners and we’re seeing managed services becoming more and more utilized. And again, this is a value-add that I think a lot of partners can take advantage of and access because the skills shortage inside an organization is pretty high, especially in threat hunting areas.

So we’ve been supporting that community for a long time, and building improved tools and capabilities, whether it’s the purchasing of the product through an MSP model, to managing our products. So if you’re an MSP, you can manage multiple Trend Micro customers from a single vantage point. So we’re giving them the tools to be able to provide that value to the organization. We just want them to be able to service the customers better. We don’t have a lot of the resources available to do that for our customers, so we rely on the partners tremendously to help bring that capability to them.