Organisations are planning on changes for next year; while some markets will continue to be limited, growth will come from efficiency gains and consolidation of vendors and channels.
Conversations between Tim Jeans (pictured, top right) Softcat Solutions Sales Director, Amanda Adams senior director, European Alliances at Crowdstrike and IT Europa showed a move to positive change.
For Tim Jeans, it meant a drive into certain markets: “We have just started our new financial year, but the results continue to show that enterprise and public sector work is growing faster than the mid-market for us. But there are more flavours to that; the market dynamics from Softcat where the business is diverging from the mid-market heartland we came from, so there is a lot of addressable market. It is healthy for us to have a more even share of each market, which says a lot about our technical capability and consultative areas. It also represents the fact that the public sector is stronger at the moment and that the larger enterprises are able to weather the crisis storms better.”
Every challenge has an opportunity, he says. “I think customer loyalty is a challenge now – as IT organisations are pressured more internally – from a commercial or financial perspective, that loyalty and need to demonstrate value is a challenge. This also means that there is an opportunity for us to demonstrate to customers who need to get a second opinion or option just what Softcat can do.”
"I think the other noticeable trend in customer conversation is a focus on the renewal base; some vendors are focusing on retaining the install base and growing out from that. That lends itself to the customer looking to consolidate vendors. Organisations are looking at consolidation – both of technologies and vendors," he says.
Customers are looking at how they operate effectively, and in the past where ecurity may have been an afterthought but is now central. The cloud, which has seen strong growth this year, is where customer organisations have adopted a cloud-first attitude, but this is moving to cloud-appropriate services, he says.
Customers are asking how to use SaaS and IaaS models as organisations need to find an effective operating model.
Amanda Adams – “Looking forward, the market message around endpoint security can be confusing – so we want our partners to be very clear on what Crowdstrike does and the value it brings so that they understand specific use cases and the outcomes we provide. The second thing is that from a services standpoint, we have partners with the ability to use the products in their own services, with training and certification. The programme is tiered so that the more they invest, the more they are able to make a difference.”
Crowdstrike itself is shifting from being an endpoint company to a workload company. “That is something that, as a partner, I would want to understand, it is going to be important to have a presence there.”
And it is still set on expansion, building the pipeline with partners. This pipeline has not decreased in 2020, apart from certain obvious segments, she says.
“Looking at 2021, we are looking at what is working, adding headcount. “
In much of Europe, Crowdstrike is still relatively young: “We are growing in Europe, especially in Central and Southern markets. In cybersecurity overall, it has been a strong year. The clients moving to remote working helped and we saw an uptick in associated products.”
“Softcat is a great partner with a strong investment and accreditations and they are able to integrate Crowdstrike into their own offerings. But we know it can be very confusing with all the competition and the messages out there.”
“We see those MSPs and partners growing in Europe – we are adding headcount, particularly in southern Europe, and there will be a focus on the large integrators on proactive responses,” she adds.
And Europe may be proving even more problematic, with different reactions, timings of lockdowns and similar: one response is to look at two-tier provision. The fundamental strategy is focus on the quality of partners, but for the smaller user organisations Crowdstrike is looking at distribution in certain regions. It will keep a direct engagement with the major resellers like Softcat, however. In eastern Europe and the Nordics for example, it is looking at distribution to sell into those very small SMB and MSP partners – people buying 5-50 licences.
“Working with distribution allows us to expand the market in Europe; I see a value in distribution for specific use cases.”
For more ideas and predictions for the coming year see our special webinar on December 2 at 3pm details here:
Speakers in clude John Garratt, Editor at IT Europa
Chris Bunch, Chief Operating Officer at Cloud Technology Solutions
Don Randall MBE, Senior Security Advisor - Former Head of Security at the Bank of England
Kyle Torres, Channel Account Executive – MSP UKI/WER at Sophos
Naj Raza, General Manager at UnitrendsMSP
Mark Winter, Vice President Sales at RapidFire Tools
Kelvin Murray, Senior Threat Research Analyst at Webroot, an OpexText Company
Alex Ford, Sales Director EMEA at IT Glue
Amelia Paro, Channel Development Manager at ID Agent
