Trend Micro Partner Program Gets Big Redesign

Cybersecurity giant Trend Micro on Wednesday announced what it’s calling a “complete redesign” of its global partner program, with a goal of helping partners grow their businesses and increasing the value they offer to customers.

Built around the Trend Vision One platform, the focus of the program is to help partners deliver security services to both SMB and enterprise customers.

Trend Micro’s Eva Chen

“Our partners have been an indispensable part of our extraordinary journey spanning over three decades,” said Eva Chen, Trend Micro CEO. “We anticipate the achievements still to come as we continue to strategically align with our partners to safeguard the digital world. As we introduce a new era of the channel with this completely re-designed partner program, I am proud to announce our joint mission to enable partners to become the most resilient cybersecurity companions and guide our customers through their security life cycle.”

Trend Micro says its One platform enhances and consolidates detection, investigation and response capabilities, protecting email, endpoints, servers, cloud workloads and networks from cybersecurity incidents.

Trend Micro Partner Program Focuses On Cyber Risk Assessments

Notable in the updated Trend Micro partner program is improving the ability for partners to offer security assessments – notably cyber risk assessments – to customers. It also includes external attack surface, cloud posture and Azure Active Directory assessments. Trend says more than 800 of its partners have already completed more than 1,400 customer cyber risk assessments.

Not surprisingly, artificial intelligence is a component of the redesigned Trend Micro partner program. The company says AI can help partner analysts understand the next threat alert and give them more opportunities to grow within a customer’s account.

Breaking it down further, Trend Micro says the partner program refresh gives partners several new benefits. Those include new technical and service competencies in cloud security, professional services, managed security and more; new lead-generation tools and customer workshops; better deal participation and co-selling; access to Trend Campus, a webinar series that supports hybrid learning across three progressive tracks, as well as in-depth, one-on-one consultation for competency partners; and more.

“Working alongside Trend has empowered us to deliver unmatched security and tremendous value to our customers,” said Anne Saunders, global director of cybersecurity partnerships at Capgemini, the large systems integrator. “As we see growing complexity in the cybersecurity landscape, our partnership with Trend is a key element to our success in enabling business transformation. We’re looking forward to giving more customers the tools they need to secure their organizations with confidence.”

More than one-half of the 147,000 partners in the Trend Micro partner program have taken broader cybersecurity training in the past year. The company says deal registration has increased significantly, especially by co-selling partners. AWS consulting partner private offers (CPPO) have grown 42% year over year, and there’s been a 46% increase in MSP partners selling XDR over that same time frame.

CloudEQ’s Sean Barker

“Organizations rely on us to address their business challenges and speed up their digital transformation while ensuring business continuity,” said Sean Barker, CEO at CloudEQ, a Trend Micro partner. “Security is a shared responsibility and a critical element of the cloud migration journey, and we work alongside Trend to provide customers with proactive and automated cloud security. The latest iteration of Trend’s partner program will further enable us to deepen our expertise and broaden our services to safeguard our customers’ cloud applications.”