Technology Reseller v39

01732 759725 32 BUSINESS BRIEFING With Jon-Marc Wilkinson, Director Sales, UK and Ireland at WatchGuard Technologies, and Tony Price, Director of Solutions at Northamber Q&A Technology Reseller (TR) : WatchGuard is famous for its firewalls, but it has also been broadening its offering through acquisitions. What is the thinking behind your acquisition strategy? Jon-Marc Wilkinson: It would be very easy for a company that has been in existence for 25 years to stay focused on firewalls, or unified threat management (UTM) appliances. But at WatchGuard we don’t like to stand still, so over the past few years we have acquired a few companies. This strategy is now accelerating to meet demand for more unified solutions. In the mid-market, end user customers are asking partners to manage more of their IT infrastructure from a security perspective. Partners don’t necessarily have the resources to go out and manage multiple standalone products, so we are undertaking the hard work for them. We are going out and acquiring best-of-breed products and enabling partners to manage them all via a single pane of glass. TR : One of these acquisitions is Panda Security, which WatchGuard announced one year ago in March 2020. Its endpoint EDR solutions are a useful addition for resellers who, as you say, are increasingly being asked to provide IT on a managed service basis. How else is WatchGuard addressing this demand? Jon-Marc Wilkinson: Anyone who becomes part of the WatchGuardONE partner programme gets access to what we call our MSSP dashboard, which gives them a single interface for activating multiple devices and security services. Customers today need additional flexibility when it comes to their IT environment. It is no longer a question of buying a solution and using it for the foreseeable. Businesses want agile solutions, which can be flexed, depending on current requirements. A good example, which Northamber is taking to market, is our WatchGuard FlexPay or subscription billing option. FlexPay allows partners to offer their customers with various billing options, based around a monthly consumption model. WatchGuard has been a leader in firewalls for the last 25 years and for most of that time Northamber has been one of their main UK distributors. Although network security is still a key focus, WatchGuard also offers solutions in other areas, notably endpoint security (following last year’s acquisition of Panda Security), multi-factor authentication and secure cloud Wi-Fi. As well as providing channel partners with additional sales opportunities through its expanded product portfolio, WatchGuard provides an easier route to managed services with unified device management. To find out more, Technology Reseller caught up with Jon-Marc Wilkinson, WatchGuard Technologies Director of Sales, UK and Ireland, and Tony Price, Director of Solutions at Northamber. Jon-Marc Wilkinson Tony Price