Trellix looks to democratise access to XDR in APAC

Trellix, the new cyber security company formed from the merger of FireEye Enterprise and McAfee, hopes to democratise access to extended detection and response (XDR) capabilities in Asia-Pacific (APAC) with its combined portfolio and managed services offerings, according to its top executive in the region.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Craig Nielsen, vice-president of Trellix in Asia-Pacific and Japan, said adoption of XDR is growing in the region – even as organisations remain plagued by challenges in rolling out XDR architectures at scale. “Most organisations are struggling with a fundamental area in security, which is having a majority of their systems being siloed and static, and having to work extraordinarily hard to attempt to connect these systems,” he said.

“That process of connecting static and siloed systems is expensive and involves big, heavy technology,” said Nielsen. “It requires highly skilled teams and resources, and a lot of manual intervention to maintain that connected architecture. That’s essentially the problem we’re going after.”

To grow its footprint and democratise access to XDR capabilities in APAC, he said Trellix will build on its investments in research and development, channel partnerships, sales and customer success.

More specifically, the company is looking to team up with managed service providers that understand local markets, create bundles that deliver the right level of capability for customers and help partners develop capabilities to support organisations in smaller or less mature markets.

“We’ve come to this moment in time in APAC, having had a number of strong growth years in our business,” said Nielsen. “To deliver that means we’ve performed across all of our segments, and underneath that, we have great capability and capacity in our ability to reach the market.

“We think this announcement is going to put wind in our sails. We know that this market, including in APAC, is growing really fast,” he said, noting that some analysts expect the global XDR market to grow by over 80% year on year and that XDR penetration in the region stands at just about 5%.

As with any corporate mergers, Trellix would have to rationalise its product lines, with one analyst noting potential overlaps in network security, endpoint security and security information and event management.

But Nielsen said there is “very little overlap” in the portfolios of McAfee and FireEye Enterprise. “The FireEye business has some amazing backend XDR capability in terms of advanced techniques around the Helix platform that’s really going to complement what we’re doing on the McAfee side,” he said.

“McAfee brings some best-in-class market capabilities around learning and adapting to help customers prevent breaches,” said Nielsen. “So, these are the kinds of capabilities and synergies that come together on the product side and many more on the go-to-market side.”

Simon Piff, vice-president of security practice at IDC Asia-Pacific, told Computer Weekly that the formation of Trellix was a bold move that would likely be good for APAC markets as both McAfee and FireEye have a strong presence in the region.

“But making it all work as a single platform will take time, so the pressure is on for their engineering teams to provide the local sales teams with a holistic manageable offering, and not more integration challenges,” he added.