Tech Data: The security market has to change

Tech Data is looking to shake up the security market and make changes in a landscape that the distributor feels is not working for resellers or users.

With most enterprise customers struggling to manage up to 45 products and remain on top of an ever growing number of threats there is an argument to be made for change.

David Ellis, vice president, security and mobility solutions, Europe at Tech Data, is keen to champion the side of the debate that is calling for change to the current status quo.

"We think there needs to be a lot of disruption in the market," he said "There needs to be a change both from a channel and an end user perspective."

"There is no way that customers can manage so many devices, keep their skills current when we know there is a shortage and no way they can afford on an ongoing basis to keep paying software subscriptions and support on all those technologies," he added.

"It is not sustainable and there needs to be some rationalisation in the market and there needs to be change. We are not saying that we can take an enterprise on a journey to reduce it to one or two vendors but we can help them rationalise it to down to 15 or whatever," said Ellis.

The channel is also facing issues supporting all the numerous vendors with costs of training and support and as a result there is pressure in that community as well.

The approach that the distributor is taking is to work with a small number of system architecture vendors, including Cisco, IBM and Check Point, that can provide the bulk of what a customer would need. Gaps are then filled with additional ecosystem vendors that have additional tools.

"We think our expertise and knowledge in adjacent areas like cloud and IoT and understanding the data centre do differentiate us from those distributors that have a pure-play security background," added Ellis.

The channel player is currently showing its practice builder tools at InfoSec to help partners deal with specific areas like GDPR and securing IoT endpoints and ransomware.

"We provide the tools and the collateral, everything to enable a partner to be able to go out there and build a business. It is very solutions orientated," he added "The real goal is about solutions and enabling our partners to deliver that."

Earlier this week the distributor indicated that it is planning to double the headcount in its security practice by the end of this year as it looks to increase the support it can provide vendors and partners.