F-Secure rebrand should benefit channel

The recent decision by F-Secure to establish separate branding for its B2B and consumer products should benefit its channel partners, says the security player’s CEO.

Last week, the corporate security business was relaunched as WithSecure, with the decision to split having been made back in February.

The firm starts life under its new brand with its existing network of partners and an established customer base, but has plans to build on that and grow with a more focused apporoach.

Juhani Hintikka, president and CEO of the firm, said the plan had been discussed in the past and there had been a sense that the business was not large enough to support that approach, but it was now bigger and both sides of the business had independent product portfolios, so it made sense.

“Both businesses have totally independent product portfolios are also independent go-to-market organisations,” he said. “That, of course, has meant that they are essentially not dependent on each other at all.”

Hintikka said the decision to rebrand brought several advantages for its channel, including making its proposition clearer to customers.

“Look up the what is associated with F-Secure when you Google it,” he said. “The first three pages are about consumer business. So, for our partners, this has always meant that when they go and see a new corporate customer, they need to spend the first 15 minutes explaining what they are not.

“We think the increased focus will give us an opportunity to serve them better, and by better I mean faster time to market – a more focused organisation in terms of serving them. We can just go forward and execute based on what we think is required by our customers and partners.”

Partners have known that the changes were coming for the past couple of months and Hintikka said there had been a positive reaction from the channel.

It remained a good choice of vendor for the channel and the market it served continued to reward partners with growth, he said.

“There is momentum at the moment. So, you could say we’re a bit lucky in the sense that this coincides with our brand launch, because there is increasing demand and our business is growing We are just accelerating the momentum that’s already there,” said Hintikka.

“Customers – in this case the companies, enterprises – they’re looking for partners who can simplify things. We call it “servitisation of security”, and the business model is subscription-based. I foresee that this will be increasing as a subscription business, where we will package things in such a way that is it simple to buy and consume and use it.”