Trellix Xpand Live 2022 Day 2: Partners Look Forward to New Channel Program

That’s a wrap for Trellix Xpand Live 2022, and a number of partners said they’re impressed with the company’s road map and are looking forward to its new partner program.

The company’s first conference, including a partner summit, took place this week in Las Vegas. Trellix Xpand attracted about 1,500 attendees.

The company stems from the merger of McAfee Enterprise and FireEye last October. STG acquired both companies last year.

Robert Bogan is CGI Federal‘s senior consultant.

“I was very much impressed with the roadmap I saw from the presentation,” he said. “I work with federal agencies and a lot of them have some of the remnants of the legacy pieces of Trellix, being FireEye and McAfee. And so to see their vision in terms of incorporating the two companies together is actually kind interesting. It differentiates them. I really like what FireEye brings to the table in terms of their researchers and their team.”

Trellix will launch its new partner program, Xtend, during the first quarter of 2023. It’s Trellix’ first unified partner program.

“We are going to benefit from the new partner program,” Bogan said. “One of my roles is I sit on an endpoint detection and response (EDR) team and we absolutely are going to benefit. With our partnership, they’ll provide us training. We need that with the team to be able to offer our customers an unbiased capabilities list of what they bring to the table.”

How Trellix Compares to Competitors

Bogan said he’s interested in bringing back to his team what differentiates Trellix from some of the other tools CGI Federal is looking at from its competitors like SentinelOne and CrowdStrike.

“FireEye was first in line in terms of EDR, so they always look good as a tool,” he said. “But because of the recent merger, there was a little confusion in terms of looking at the different components. So my take back from the conference and partnership is they have plans for that, specifically to do the integration and make the single-pane-of-glass experience less painful for our end users, to bridge that gap between those two tools. We’re familiar with both of those tools, but I heard them say they’re aware that McAfee brings a better user interface. So it looks like they’re trying to bridge that gap by bringing the best of both worlds together and it’s very interesting to see how that happens.”

‘Tremendous’ Opportunity Around Data Security

Seclore’s John Murrugarra

John Murrugarra is an enterprise account executive with Seclore. He said his company sees “tremendous opportunity” with Trellix around data security.

“We’re in the business of helping businesses protect their intellectual property,” he said. “And to see where Trellix is going around data security, around data protection, is encouraging. It’s been a challenge that’s been around for many years and nobody’s been able to quite get it right. But what I’m learning that Trellix is just trying to make it easier for everyone, to automate and bring more value. We fit into that ecosystem. I’m looking forward to how we now put it all into action going home.”

Aaron Jones is Emerson‘s manager of cybersecurity and shared services.

“The conference has been great, I like it a lot,” he said. “I’m sure we’ll benefit from the new partner program.”

Trellix has been meeting Emerson’s expectations as a partner, Jones said.

“They’re great to work with, great products, and I’m looking forward to selling more together,” he said.

Shift in Trellix’s Channel Strategy

Trellix’s Britt Norwood

Britt Norwood is Trellix’s senior vice president of global channels and commercial. He said partners have been “really gracious with us” as the company has operated with two separate partner programs.

Xtend represents a shift in Trellix‘ channel strategy, he said.

“We had over 15,000 partners when I took over the channel in November [2021],” Norwood said. “We needed to get to the right 200 to 300 and really invest heavily in those 200 to 300 partners. We’re OK with the long-tail business, but that’s really going to go to our distributors and we want them to really take control of that. So we’re really going to be able to focus our team on those top partners globally. It’s going to be better for them because there will be a better volume of business for each one of them to go after. And it will also be better for them because we’re going to really be able to spend more time with them and really build a practice up. So I would say those are probably the two biggest pivots that we’ve done inside the model.”

In addition, Trellix wants to work closer with distribution, he said.

“So we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know the distribution, the distributors worldwide,” Norwood said. “They’ve been great and we just haven’t really put the right resourcing and investment there, and profitability for them as well. So we really want to make sure that they’re excited to work with us to really help us with those longer tail other partners. But then the ones that are truly building that service play and want to go to market with us, we want that to be the core focus for the company.”

Portfolio to Support Partners in New Channel Program

Aparna Rayasam is Trellix’s chief product officer. She said Trellix’s portfolio is geared toward maximizing partners’ opportunities and success in the new partner program.

“Increasingly when we talk to our customers, they’re looking at partners to help deploy and implement Trellix’s solutions for them,” she said. “So what we want to
do is work for the partners in a way that’s profitable, both for the end customer and the partners. So what are the opportunities that they can do value-add services, for example, and how do we support them? How does the partner support look? Do they work with us? Do they extend our customer success and support teams? So that’s one aspect. The other one is each of these solutions, if partners become the service providers, we don’t want them to be clicking the buttons. We want to make that easy for the partners. But then we want to provide the intelligence to them so that they are the experts that the customers are talking to. So there are multiple avenues. In a few cases, partners may be managing more than one customer, and again in a MSSP model, so we are working with them to give them a federated view of all the customers that they’re managing so they can deploy protection or they can deploy policy across all of them. So it’s a very specific, bespoke partner enablement program. Obviously, we want to work with added customers wherever if there is opportunity. So it’s almost like parallel efforts to make sure that we are satisfying the partner enablement.”