Increasing Cybersecurity Billings

Channel Futures: Last month, BlackBerry reported its third consecutive quarter of sequential cybersecurity billings growth. What role did partners play in this growth?

Colleen McMillan: Our partners have been doing a pretty great job. We’ve had some really good growth areas, especially around the MSSP arena, where we’re seeing more and more customers looking for a managed service offering. They’re trying to have a simplified approach to cybersecurity and having someone help them with that, where they provide that managed service offering 24/7/365. So we did have some really solid growth in the MSSP space, which is all partner driven, as you can imagine. And our top MSSPs, some of them have just grown significantly, 70% to 80%. But if you’re to look at maybe the top 50, they’re experiencing 30%-plus growth. So really seeing that simplified type solution without sacrificing the security protection.

They can still rely on the AI-driven protection solution and then the partners can add in their managed service offering around that. That is where we’ve seen some incredible growth. And we’re still seeing 85%-plus maybe a point or two of partner interaction with our billings. And BlackBerry is very partner friendly and working to continue to grow the billings through that.