Trellix Xpand Live 2022 Day 1: Trellix Unveils First Unified Partner Program, Leaving Behind McAfee, FireEye
Trellix says it's doing a better job with partners than both McAfee and FireEye.
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Britt Norwood is Trellix’s senior vice president of global channels and commercial. He said input from partners was crucial to developing the new partner program.
“We spent a lot of time talking to our top partners to really understand the needs, the wants, the concerns, and we put it through to the advisory board,” he said. “We just did the most recent one today because we’re still finalizing the discount structure that’s going to go with it. And they had some great input. They gave us a lot of feedback that we’re able to use. So we’re just listening and we realize there’s no silver bullet in a program, but we do want to make it so that it really brings profitability into play. And so that was why we were really reaching out to them. So we probably iterated it 50 times before we got to what the final piece was that we rolled out.”
Norwood said the program is designed to move Trellix away from the “precious metal” of gold, silver, bronze and platinum.
“We’re really going to reward for value,” he said. “And that’s what we heard loud and clear. If we’re going to make an investment in you, we want to be rewarded for that. Even though we may not be the largest volume player, if we’re building a service practice, we want to be in your most profitable category because it’s expensive for them to build a service practice. So that was kind of the feedback that we got. So that was really the underlying design principle. And then the second one is they felt like if they were creating demand for us, they should be the most well-rewarded part of the program. So when you really look at how the program lays out, the partner that has a service practice and it’s creating demand will be the most well-rewarded partner in the program, which I mean, seems fair, but we wanted to really bring that to life. The other thing is simplicity. They needed it to be super clear. How do I do a deal registration? How do I know I have it registered? And we just are bringing a lot of simplicity to the way we’re going to do it going forward. So overall, they’ve had really good feedback on it. Of course not everything is perfect, so we’re tweaking a few little things. But they’re really excited when they saw where the rewards were going to lie.”
Trellix has been operating two different partner programs, one for McAfee and the other for FireEye. The new program finally ends that separation, Norwood said.
“Obviously the brand is living security and we’re thinking of this in a very different way,” he said. “The other thing is from the very top levels inside of Trellix, our CEO and CRO, they’re committed to the channel. They’ve seen the channel be a successful business they can build a practice on. So we looked at what we inherited and we absolutely pivoted, and we wanted it to go away. So we really scrapped the old program and this is all new and with a completely different focus. We want to get the right partners, and that’s the right thing for our customers. But in order to get them, we had to make it profitable and fair, and that’s what they’re asking for. So yeah, we’ve pretty much scrapped everything that existed before.”
Starting next month, Trellix will initiate a notification period that the McAfee and FireEye programs will be tapering off at the end of 90 days, Norwood said. And then it will invite the partners to join with where they fit into the new program.
“There’ll be three categories: growth, momentum and collaborate,” he said. “And they’ll be invited to whichever one of those categories makes sense. Partners who want to do business with us will absolutely be invited. So we’ll keep everybody who’s active with us today. We’re not like throwing people out of the program. I don’t want that to be the understanding. But there will probably be people that are still registered with us that don’t want to really do business with us. They’ve registered for a deal or two like five years ago. We’re going to clean that up. Then the program will go live in Q1 of next year.”
Aparna Rayasam is Trellix’s chief product officer. She said Trellix has multiple design principles when it comes to developing solutions.
The first is simplicity.
“We don’t focus on solutions, but the problem,” she said. “We design solutions for your workforce.”
The second is personalization, designing solutions that work for each individual organization, Rayasam said.
“The next one is scale,” she said. “We want to scale so you don’t have to for every attack.”
Next is intelligence, followed by platform agnosticity, Rayasam said.
“We want to meet our customers where they are. so now layered on top of Trellix,” she said.
Trellix is expanding the reach of its open platform with the addition of 10 technology partners. These include a new partnership with Tenable, enabling a risk-based view of a customer’s entire attack surface. The Trellix XDR risk score of an asset is automatically updated when vulnerabilities are shared from Tenable.io. This allows security analysts to quickly determine if a threat corresponds to a high-risk asset and enables them to respond faster via curated playbooks and orchestration.
In addition to Tenable, Trellix has added Lineaje, Arista Networks, Keysight Ixia, Elevate Security, Sumo Logic, SecureX.ai, Okta, GreyNoise and CPacketNetworks to its Security Innovation Alliance (SIA). These new additions bring the ecosystem to over 800 partners integrated with Trellix XDR.
Also at Xpand, Trellix released global research revealing the cost of siloed security, weak spots in protection and lack of confidence among security operations teams.
Trellix polled 9,000 global cybersecurity professionals. Eighty-nine percent of respondents describe their current security model as “siloed”. Consequentially, three-quarters are likely allocating budget to advanced solutions, including XDR, to enable an integrated security approach.
Eighty-four percent estimate their organization lost up to 10% of revenue from security breaches in the last 12 months. Mid-size businesses lost an average of 8% in revenue, compared to 5% for large businesses, representing revenue losses of between $500 million and $1.25 billion.
Thirty-six percent of cybersecurity professionals feel very confident in their organization’s ability to quickly adapt to new threats, while 60% admit security threats evolve so rapidly, they’re struggling to keep up.
On average, respondents’ organizations deal with 51 cybersecurity incidents each day, while over a third admit they cope with 50 to 200 incidents daily. Almost half report being “inundated by a never-ending stream of cyberattacks” as one of their biggest work frustrations.
Disconnected solutions are holding businesses back. Six in 10 cybersecurity professionals admit their current security tools do not enable their security operations team to work with maximum efficiency. One third recognize they have blind spots in their protection today.
“This research reveals how unsustainable the situation is for cybersecurity professionals today,” Rayasam said. “Instead of relying on traditional solutions that add complexity, businesses can reshape security operations with a flexible, intelligent security platform designed to consolidate security tools and quickly remediate threats.”
Also during Xpand, Trellix announced new efforts to close the cybersecurity industry’s 2.72 million-person talent gap.
Trellix unveiled SoulfulWork.com, an industry education and recruiting resource designed for professionals looking to break into cybersecurity. Trellix says it’s committed to changing the industry mindset regarding the talent pool for recruiting the next generation of cybersecurity experts.
Trellix announced a partnership with St. John’s University’s College of Professional Studies to create avenues for its diverse graduates. Trellix is donating services to help to improve students’ cybersecurity skills through curriculum development, classroom instruction, and computer-based learning.
“We have to improve diversity,” Palma said. “We’ve hired about a half dozen people in the past month and they said they came on board because of Soulful Work.”
Also during Xpand, Trellix announced new efforts to close the cybersecurity industry’s 2.72 million-person talent gap.
Trellix unveiled SoulfulWork.com, an industry education and recruiting resource designed for professionals looking to break into cybersecurity. Trellix says it’s committed to changing the industry mindset regarding the talent pool for recruiting the next generation of cybersecurity experts.
Trellix announced a partnership with St. John’s University’s College of Professional Studies to create avenues for its diverse graduates. Trellix is donating services to help to improve students’ cybersecurity skills through curriculum development, classroom instruction, and computer-based learning.
“We have to improve diversity,” Palma said. “We’ve hired about a half dozen people in the past month and they said they came on board because of Soulful Work.”
Day 1 of Trellix Xpand Live 2022 unveiled lots of upcoming opportunities for its partners, including a new unified partner program, Trellix Xtend, an expanded extended detection and response (XDR) platform and more.
The company’s first conference is taking place this week in Las Vegas. Trellix Xpand attracted about 1,500 attendees.
Trellix’s Bryan Palma
Bryan Palma is Trellix’s CEO. He said Trellix, which launched in January, is a channel-first organization.
“We don’t want to be in the services business and we won’t,” he said. “Many [cybersecurity companies] are doing that and are taking away from channel. We have over 800 XDR integrations, we announced 10 this week, and then we’ve got some great partners. We couldn’t be more excited about our partners and what we’re going to do.”
Trellix is completely revamping its partner program, Palma said. Trellix has over 5,000 partners, and among its plans for them are a big push with managed detection and response (MDR) providers and MSPs.
Launching in early 2023, Trellix Xtend offers:
Partner enablement, delivering a training curriculum that supports partners from first-sale to first-install of the Trellix XDR platform.
Demand creation, using differentiated sales plays to accelerate customer engagement, increase deal registration and build sales pipeline.
Partner support, providing a premium post-sale experience, including 24/7 support and resources, enabling advisor relationships with Trellix XDR customers.
Professional services, featuring playbooks enabling partners to build managed services and incident response offerings, leveraging Trellix intellectual property, and applying threat intelligence from Trellix Advanced Research Center.
Trellix Doing Better with Partners than FireEye, McAfee
“Partners are excited,” Palma said. “I think they’re excited about what we’re saying from the top … that we’re a channel-first company and we’re committed, and we’ve rolled out a new program that wasn’t the FireEye program and it wasn’t the McAfee program. I think both of the former organizations didn’t do a good job of that. McAfee did a little bit better job. FireEye had some issues obviously having Mandiant having its own managed service. That was one of the things we really wanted to decouple from because it was a barrier to structure.”
Partners feel like “they can work with us,” he said.
“We have a broad portfolio, they know we’re a market leader,” Palma said. “And hearing that we’re committed to the channel I think has been a refreshing message for them. I think like always, they want to see how the program’s going to work. Are they going to make money? Are we going to stand behind what we said? So it’s a little show me, but I would expect nothing less from our partners.”
Arriving in the fourth quarter of 2022, the upgraded XDR engine provides security operations teams with enhanced playbooks for guided investigations. It also provides upgraded threat intelligence through the integration of McAfee and FireEye assets, and the launch of Trellix Event Fabric. Trellix Event Fabric bridges disparate security data from any cloud provider, allowing security analysts to access and correlate data from anywhere. This combination of machine learning (ML) and automation allows security operations teams to reduce mean time detection and improve mean time to response.
SecOps ‘Revolution’
Palma said a top priority of Trellix is “SecOps revolution.” Security information and event management (SIEM) is outdated with no automation, and customers say it’s too costly and ineffective.
“We will replace SIEM with something better,” he said.
In addition, Trellix is building an enterprise platform and has been working on its XDR for 18 months, Palma said. When it comes to security operations, Trellix is “building from a strong base.”
“We’re excited about where we’re going,” he said. “Nobody else has the assets and experience we have.”
Scroll through our slideshow for more from Day 1 of Trellix Xpand Live.
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