By Kathy Gibson – Sophos has a long history in the South African channel, and now it is making it easier for partners to bring its security offerings to market.
With a channel-led go-to-market model, Sophos works with about 58 000 partners around the world, about 65% of which are in the EMEA region.
“We have a really good mix of partners,” says Gerard Allison, vice-president: sales for EMEA at Sophos. “They range all the way from large multinational integrators all the way to security value-added reseller and networking partners.
“We also have a big focus on Managed Service Providers (MSP), and are seeing this area grow as customers increasingly move to an MSP offering, where they find it easier to consume security solutions.”
The growing threat landscape, and the potential for massive losses, means that cybersecurity is top of mind for customers, who grapple with a number of challenges.
A skills shortage is a major challenge, for customers, partners and vendors – and it’s a global phenomenon, Allison says.
“Just think about the number of security vendors offering solutions – they are all looking to the same skills sets that customers and partners want to tap.”
To help partners mitigate this issues, Sophos is working to help partners on their own skills journey, introduce them to security solutions, and assist them in securing their customers’ systems.
The company has introduced a new service, Partner Care, that is dedicated to looking after and communicating with partners. The service, which is manned by 35 dedicated people, can help partners with onboarding, answer queries, address licencing concerns and more? “It basically allows partners to interact directly with the vendor,” Allison explains.
Sophos describes Partner Care as a new offering in its global partner program that features a dedicated, 24×7 team of Sophos experts who handle non-sales related questions and operational support.
The offering is designed to speed up response times for Sophos partners and MSPs needing assistance with administrative and operational tasks, freeing them up to focus on selling and securing their customers with Sophos’ portfolio of managed services and endpoint, network, email, and cloud security solutions.
Sophos Partner Care offers a single point of contact for quoting, navigating the partner portal, addressing licensing queries, Not For Resale (NFR) requests, and more. With this high level of service, partners working with small and mid-market organisations can better boost their productivity and increase profitability.
Partner Care is an invaluable resource for helping partners manage customer licence renewals, Allison says. “It helps them to renew subscriptions on an annual basis – and also to upgrade or cross-sell.
“The feedback on Partner Care so far has been very positive,” he adds.
While Partner Care helps to automate many services, one comment that Sophos is taking to heart is a call to retain a personal touch.
“We monitor that as well, and learn from what partners ask, looking at where it makes sense to automate services.
“But we are keeping it real as well, in line with the feedback we have had.”
The company also helps partners and MSPs to stay on top of critical industry issues by providing real-time and historical threat intelligence from its Sophos X-Ops unit.
Sophos X-Ops’ intelligence helps partners and MSPs confidently address customers’ questions and concerns about the latest ransomware, vulnerabilities and attacks circulating in the news.