WatchGuard’s acquisition of Panda over the last four months certainly seems timely now. Adding endpoint security to the core network business was obviously made more difficult by current events, but the Panda side and partners have been growing very rapidly says Jonathan Whitley, Sales Director – Northern Europe, WatchGuard Technologies.
The business now has some 6500 Panda and 11,500, making a total of 18,000 active partners globally, but it has not been the easiest of times to integrate the two. “We’ve kept the WatchGuard management structure the same, but we have had to work in an imaginative way to do the integration. We are used to remote working at WatchGuard; culturally we’re been good at integration.”
Yes, he has seen a slowdown in the bit of the business that requires engineers to go on-site – wifi access points etc, but people have adjusted well, he says and agrees that most businesses in this industry are probably more productive now without all the traveling.
“It has been an interesting journey – we have made a lot of changes to the business. In the Nordics, for example, the business was run in a very different way with no distribution at all. In just a couple of months, we got two-tier up and running there. In the UK, distribution used to be much smaller – we’re now getting 30%-40% of our volume through them now. That has happened in a couple of months.
This portfolio expansion is part of an on-going process; initially it worked on ensuring the two sets of partners were aware of the other products, then getting them to work with the products. This seemed to work and bring in new business, he says. “Now (October) we have integrated the products suites and price-lists. We have integrated some Panda components into WatchGuard Passport with endpoint security, MFA and DNS firewalling for example to give a richer set.”
He now needs to get the distributors and partners used to this, and the technical integration is under way. Things are getting much more technical inevitably.
The MSP market is now an area of particular interest, he reports, as customers move to a consumption model. MSPs really want integrated pricing and technical brought together so everything works together with billing models.Cybersecurity has been buoyant overall with a lot of acquisitions by bigger players, and this opens up space of new players to come in with ideas, he says.
“Most resellers do not want additional vendors, so we aim to be *the* provider of security services for MSPs. We offer a very broad portfolio, with WatchGuard Cloud now giving the ability to monitor and provision customers. But one of the things we are good at, and where we have a lot of new things is around the way the partners consume the products. Some have bought products and used financing option for flexible billing, we have also launched MSSP Points which allow a very flexible way to provision and manage with a consistent billing. This has been growing at more than 40% a year in all regions. But we are also looking at moving that across to other billing model to offer flexibility. We have to have the best products, but backed with automation and easy of use and management.”
So the big thing coming down the line will be to do with billing models – “We will put a lot more into more flexible billing. We’ve done it in the US with one of our distributors and will bring it to northern Europe - subscription billing allows resellers to pay on a monthly basis.”
The other thing is around security management – this is key, ensuring that all the products can be managed by WatchGuard Cloud for the convenience. These are the big investment areas.
“We also sold a certain amount of Passport to key customers, but these were sold as licenses for MFA; [this is] another of the things we are integrating now is so that the solution will be much richer So we expect a bigger focus on this and an easier sale for the channel.”
And is the nature of the channel changing?
“Some of our biggest MSPs have a broad offering, but we also have security specialists; I would say that over half our resellers now list cybersecurity as a key service they offer.”
The move to different layers of security has made it more complex and the complexity of security needs and management may be driving the shift to managed services, he agrees. It can be much more cost effective for security to be outsourced to specialists as the complexity grows in future as well.
And complexity could well be driving the move to distribution that is security specialised “This really helps. Partners rely on distribution for a lot more than just product and pricing. The ability to offer professional services, training like that is very useful. The complexity is only going to increase.””
We see growth in UK and Europe, particularly in end-point security, and this is becoming a specialisation; as WatchGuard we were network -centric and now with a specialisation around the Panda products, it means the existing panda channel can move up in the WatchGuard partner programme.
The channel is already much larger, up by over 50%, and the support team is similarly enlarged, he says. “There is a lot of transition in the market so I think this will continue to increase organically.”
