The Gately Report: Synopsys to Jump-Start Investment in WhiteHat Security Partners

WhiteHat Security, which rebranded to NTT Application Security last year, had paused its partner investment efforts. But that’s changing now that the company is owned by Synopsys.

That’s according to Vatsal Sonecha, Synopsys’ vice president of strategy and corporate development. Last week, Synopsys completed its acquisition of WhiteHat Security for $330 million in cash.

Synopsys said adding WhiteHat Security will expand its application security SaaS capabilities. The two companies share a vision for delivering SaaS-based security testing solutions and building security into the software development life cycle.

Synopsys, WhiteHat Security Coming Together

Now that the acquisition is a done deal, we spoke with Sonecha to learn more about the two companies coming together.

Channel Futures: What will this acquisition mean for partners of both companies? And is Synopsys taking on new partners and new partner types with this acquisition?

Synopsys’ Vatsal Sonecha

Vatsal Sonecha: We have embarked on a journey to build our reseller business over the last two years. And we’ve been at earnest going and building that business. We brought on a channel chief in Tom Herrmann, who is now building out his team and capabilities across the whole thing. We announced a distribution agreement with Arrow. This is a very clearly thought-out plan to go and be in the partner ecosystem and make sure we are friendly to distribution. We cannot reach everywhere ourselves; that is just not possible. And so this capability goes and does that.

WhiteHat coming in had put a pause on their partner efforts under NTT. So that goodness still remained, but the partners did not see as much investment going into it. And so we intend to essentially revive that entire effort and boost the combined efforts of the channel organization and drive that. And it’s all under Tom Herrmann. We’re going to continue to build that piece out. So our commitment to the channel is strong, and you will hear that loud and clear.

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