Inbound partner request fuels Skurio expansion

For most of the last year, digital risk specialist Skurio focused on building up its UK channel and developing a programme that would appeal to managed service providers.

The firm was following the usual pattern of building its channel region by region, appointing distributors to support reseller growth, but has found itself growing its market share in Pakistan after Cydea reached out to the vendor.

The result is the chance for Skurio to launch a collaborative cyber threat intelligence solution in Pakistan called 1Tip, which is live with 11 banks that are using it to detect data breaches and cyber threats.

Mahir Sheikh, CEO of Cydea, said it recognised a need for digital risk protection in the financial services sector that it serves in Pakistan and approached Skurio to sign on as a channel partner.

“Most of the organisations that we’re dealing with didn’t have any kind of DRP solution at all in place, a small number of the larger ones had more expensive solutions from some of the traditional players and some of the more local,” he said. “But I think for a lot of the institutions, it’s a new capability.

“In the past, especially in Pakistan or in the neighbouring regions, we’ve brought in the technology, we’ve built the market pretty much ourselves, of course using vendor support.”

For Jeremy Hendy, CEO of Skurio, the approach from Cydea gave the firm a chance to accelerate its expansion into a fresh market.

“Most of our efforts were focused last year on the UK and Europe, which is easier for us to access,” he said. “I think it’s about just putting the message out that we’ve got this capability for a partner, like Cydea, that really understands what digital rights protection is. It’s enough to find our website, figure out that this is the right kind of platform and then come to us to have a discussion about what could we come up with.

“It is a combination of a targeted strategy but also those inbound opportunities, where resellers find us and find that capability. We’ve had similar successes from that perspective in Latin America as well, where we’ve had inbound inquiries from people that have been looking for a solution.”

Hendy said some of the market issues that are part of the landscape in Pakistan are also in evidence in the UK and resellers are often facing the same issues.

“With financial services in the UK, the larger institutions are reasonably familiar with this kind of solution but the penetration is still relatively low,” he said. “The big banks of course do have threat intelligence in-house and they understand the benefit of this platform, but a lot of mid-size institutions don’t have the talent in-house.”