Astaro: Acquisition by Sophos Good for Security Partners

Roughly three months after Astaro was acquired by Sophos, the unified threat management vendor is praising the ease of the integration of the two companies’ technology and partner communities.

“The leveragability of both the Sophos partner base and the Astaro base has been very complimentary,” said Bob Darabant, vice president Americas at Astaro. “ The integration has gone very smoothly [and has been] very successful, and in my 27 years of experience in the channel I haven’t seen a smoother transition ever happen.”

Darabant shared deeper thoughts in this FastChat video:

Indeed, Astaro hasn’t had to spend much time keeping its partners happy since the acquisition. “We actually have gone out on a limb to provide a forum for our partners to call into — we’ve done webinars and webcasts, we’ve done education training for individual partners  … so we’ve actually done a really good job on both sides of communicating the value proposition behind the endpoint security and the network security side,” Darabant said. “For the most part partners are looking to make more money and having more ammunition in their bag to do so, they’re very happy about it.”

Because of this, Astaro has been able to expand its partner reach into certain verticals, targeting resellers in health care, education, retail, library market, construction, and state and local government.

Additionally, Astaro is opening its ranks to managed service providers, Darabant said. “We are getting more MSPs that are looking for a managed services offering by using either the endpoint security or the network security as a vehicle to offer services to their end user customers,” he said “It’s been very exciting – we’ve had some really good traction over the last six or seven months.”

To keep up the momentum, Astaro has developed a “Success with Astaro” campaign, which aims to provide its channel partners with the support they need to increase their customer base.

“We really are all about partner relationships so when we talk about success with Astaro that means not just the deal of the day or what end users are looking for,” Darabant said. “We are actually looking to broaden our channel capabilities – have [our partners] make more money and give them the opportunities in particular vertical market sectors by providing them with marketing tools and collateral and [necessary] things … they need to go out there and attack the community and make more money.”