End of Life

CF: Last month, Secureworks reached end-of-life for its Counter Threat Platform (CTP) for most customers, and began fiscal year 2024 with Taegis and strategic consulting. How did the end of life impact Secureworks partners?

CB: If you think of the end of life of CTP, when we launched our channel program, we wanted the focus to be on Taegis. So really, even at the beginning of the channel program, all the focus that we were driving through with our partners has been on Taegis and strategic consulting. So there’s no pivot or change there. It really has allowed us to drive all of our energy to where we know the future is, which is Taegis and strategic consulting.

And with that, we’ve created incentives for our partner community to drive growth where we know the growth should be in the future. We’ve implemented a discount framework that drives more margin for our partners … We’ve also implemented some flexibility around how partners desire to transact. Some partners prefer to transact through distribution and some prefer to transact directly with us. But ultimately we want to give our partners that flexibility. Before our partner-first announcement, we had multiple ways to go to market. One was direct and one was channel. We’ve taken out that potential channel conflict. Now we’re all through the channel in North America going globally here soon. And we’ve also implemented rules of engagement and deal registration, which will also help remove any potential conflict among our solution providers so we know who we’re teaming with and just to really take that burden off of the partners.