WithSecure focus on commercial making life easier for partners

It has been seven months since the WithSecure brand emerged out of F-Secure and the firm set out to focus its channel partners on the enterprise security market.

One of the main motivations for the change was to make it easier for partners to talk to customers about a tight enterprise proposition – and that ambition has been met, according to Dean Porter, regional vice-president for the UK and Ireland at WithSecure.

“We’ve had the company demerger and we’ve had the rebrand to WithSecure. How has that helped us with the channel? I think it’s just provided clarity. It’s given us the opportunity to tell the story about how we work with partners to support organisations with their security needs, but tell that story specific to commercial organisations,” he said.

“Instead of having to explain what we don’t do, or who we’re not, we’re simply going in and talking about what we do have, from the range of products, to services, the expertise, the skillsets we have, that we can allow organisations and our partners to take advantage of,” he added.

The vendor has also seen more interest across the channel as more partners have noted the fresh branding and strategy and looked to get involved.

“We’ve seen a lot of traditional VARs [value-add resellers] and MSPs [managed service providers] moving into that MSSP [managed security service provider] space and delivering services to their customers,” said Porter.

“We’ve seen partner growth. You know, I think if we’re looking at like the top 100/200 lists, we’re seeing a lot more of those partners engage with us in conversation, and in some cases onboarding them as partners going forward. We still want to ensure, as we always have, that we have a very intimate partnership or intimate relationship with these partners. We don’t want to have partners who are just a number to us,” said Porter.

Security remains the top concern for customers, but the channel cannot take investment in that area for granted. As the market gets ready for 2023, the need to support consolidation is continuing, and that could be driven even harder by a recession.

“This is where organisations are now looking at how they can consolidate their security. The channel is also looking at that – looking at how can they recycle budgets, maybe by instead of buying one product or one service from vendor A, another from vendor B, and another from vendor C, how they can bring that all under one roof,” he said.

Subscription pricing, with even more flexibility, is also going to rise as customers look at spreading the burden of their security investments.

“People moving from that capex [capital expenditure] model to more of a subscription model. So, lower upfront costs, spreading the cost of security, but I think that also enables people to take on more security solutions and services and budget accordingly for those services, as opposed to having to find that budget upfront,” he said.