Firsthand Experience

NTT Application Security’s Matt Lantinga nfinds himself once again dealing with M&A.

“I know I can speak from experience when we got purchased by NTT,” he said. “It basically blew up a lot of our channel. Suddenly we were competitors so it made it very difficult for us because NTT Security is a reseller. So some of our biggest, strongest channel partners suddenly looked at us as competitors and we were able to save some of the relationships at the rep level. I mean, a lot of this isn’t necessarily at the executive level. If your reps are making the right connections, even though we have this sort of, ‘Hey, you may be a competitor, we have an overlap,’ we’re able to preserve a lot of those relationships and a lot of that business. But I know there were a lot of questions that we suddenly had to answer because of who acquired us.”