Turning Point

Channel Futures: Last month, Secureworks CEO Wendy Thomas said this year marks a turning point in the company’s’ business transformation. What does that mean for Secureworks partners and what role do they play in this?

Secureworks’ Chris Bell: We’ve been going through an exciting transformation over the last couple of years, ever since we launched Taegis. If you think of when we launched Taegis and we launched our channel program, it was within a few months of each other. And that transformation centered around the transformation of us moving from our managed security services business to our cloud-native SaaS business, which is Taegis. And that consists of extended detection and response (XDR) as well as managed detection and response (MDR). So that’s one element of the transformation.

The other element which we’re equally excited about is our transformation from historically being a direct-centric company; we have gone partner-first. We announced that in North America, but we also announced that after North America, we’re going to bring that to other regions as well. And eventually globally, we will be 100% partner-first.