Trend Micro gets partners to focus on ‘customer health’

Like many in the industry, Trend Micro has seen its customers accelerate their moves into the cloud and increase levels of collaboration during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The security player has been working with partners to make sure that not only can it guide customers through the current situation, but the relationship is there to build on as the “new normal” emerges.

Many customers have had their traditional security perimeters stretched with home working and there are widespread expectations across the industry that a significant number of those workers will remain remote for the foreseeable future.

With a surge in Covid-related cyber attacks, the question of security has been occupying the minds of customers of all sizes as they adapt to a distributed workforce.

“Security has always been top of the priority list, and Covid has accelerated that,” said James Munroe, UK channel director at Trend Micro.

Even before the coronavirus hit, Trend had been taking steps to increase its portfolio, acquiring cloud security posture management (CSPM) specialist Cloud Conformity last October to improve its expertise around the frequently occurring problem of cloud infrastructure misconfiguration, which is behind a growing number of information security leaks and breaches.

Munroe said Trend Micro had encouraged its partners to focus on “customer health” during the crisis to ensure they were helping users to protect their data.

“At the start of the crisis, we wanted to make sure that customers were secure and their health was of paramount importance, protecting those assets and making sure they were using all of the tools,” he said, adding that the channel had guided many users through the options available to help keep them protected.

Trend has made free licences and assessments available to partners to offer customers during the pandemic and Munroe said it was giving its channel a chance to stand by users and provide practical support.

“It’s about being the trusted partners and we want to be sure we are offering value,” he added. “You can show who you are just beyond the product.”

Munroe said the continuing fallout from Broadcom’s acquisition of Symantec, which saw channel partners that had been selling into enterprise left with a consumer-orientated proposition, had also seen it swell its partner numbers, with some of those resellers looking to strike up fresh relationships.

“Lots of partners are coming to Trend,” he said, adding that it had also seen growing interest from born-in-the-cloud players after its move into the AWS ecosystem.

Throughout the pandemic, Trend has been communicating with partners and held a series of events encouraging them to make sure they were giving customers all the help they were entitled to.

“We have been active and transparent with partners around adding that value,” said Munroe.

“We have a very good story in the first half in the UK and globally. I am bullish but very humble about the last few months, during these unprecedented times. We want to be adding value for our customers and partners.”