5 Product And Program Updates For FireEye Partners To Watch
What's Next For The Channel?
FireEye's channel community will benefit from partner-friendly incident response and vulnerability scanning offerings as well as initiatives to support managed service providers and net new customer recruitment.
FireEye VP of Channels, Americas, Chris Carter spoke with CRN at the Cyber Defense Summit 2018 in Washington, D.C. about what the company's 600 North American partners should expect in the weeks and months ahead. Carter said the company has been focused on simplifying processes and boosting profitability through incentive programs and performance rebates for gold and platinum partners.
Between 80 percent and 90 percent of FireEye's product sales in North America go through the channel, which consists of both pure-play security partners as well as broader solution with a dedicated security practice. FireEye's channel tends to focus on customers with between 5,000 and 10,000 employees, though Carter said there is a big opportunity around supporting clients with less than 2,000 employees.
Here's a sneak peek at what's coming down the pike for FireEye partners.
5. Helix Platform Now Bundled With All Security Product Sales
FireEye is now bundling the Helix security platform into all of the company's endpoint, email and network security product sales, Carter said. The single pane of glass will enable customers and partners to leverage FireEye's intelligence more effectively, according to Carter.
Tighter integration with Helix will enable the partner or customer managing the security environment to operate more effectively by making it easier for them to take full advantage of FireEye's expertise and innovation cycle, Carter said.
Specifically, Carter said Helix helps tie the intelligence gathered from the company's Mandiant consulting services business back into the FireEye database. FireEye's innovation cycle takes the learnings from the Mandiant team and very quickly builds them into the company's products, Carter said.
4. Enhanced IR Retainers Should Spur More Partner Product, Services Sales
Solution providers without their own breach investigation capabilities can now sell FireEye's incident response retainer offering to customers to be used in the event of a breach, Carter said.
And a FireEye breach response or investigation will likely generate a lot of services work and product sales opportunities for the customer to fill, according to Carter. This should result in a lot of partner-delivered services and opportunities to sell both FireEye and non-FireEye products to customers, Carter said.
Very little overlap exists between the services provided by Mandiant and those delivered by partners, Carter said. Specifically, Carter said that Mandiant emphasizes upper-tier breach investigations and assessments, while partners focus on pen testing and provide services around assessments, deployment, and integration.
3. Partners Will Be Compensated For Recruiting Net New Customers
Solution providers will have the opportunity to earn back-end incentives of up to 4 percent of the transaction value when they prospect, bring in, and develop net new logos, according to Carter. This is FireEye's first time adding a profitability component to new customer acquisition for the partner, Carter said.
Although the promotion applies to any new logo, Carter said FireEye has generated a targeted list of new opportunities for partners to pursue. Channel partners will take the lead in going after these opportunities, Carter said, with channel account managers (CAMs) from FireEye supporting these efforts with marketing and leads.
Although FireEye is not targeting a specific vendor or a specific vendor's products with this promotion, Carter said that the initiative will end up displacing budget that customers are using for their current set of tools. Roughly 1,500 to 2,000 new enterprise customers for FireEye partners to target have been identified, Carter said, and the initiative is expected to launch within the next two weeks.
2. Partners To Gain Access To Email Vulnerability Scanning Tool
Partners will at the end of October gain access to the FireProof vulnerability scanning tool, which examines the customer's security posture in Office 365 and generates a report for the partner on the status of their client's security, according to Carter.
FireProof will make it possible for partners to go in, scan the customer's environment, and show them vulnerable areas, Carter said. From there, Carter said partners can turn to FireEye Email Threat Prevention (ETP) to help improve the customer's security posture and support their security environment through automation and access to FireEye intelligence on the Helix platform.
Partners are encouraged to lead with email when pursuing new customers since it's the most attacked vector, Carter said. Given the rate of customer migration to Microsoft Office 365, Carter said FireEye partners have a great opportunity to add value to what customers already get from Microsoft in the way of security.
1. Managed Service Version Of FireEye Offerings Coming In 2019
FireEye will in the first half of 2019 roll out managed service offerings that are specifically designed, priced and packaged for that opportunity, Carter said.
Many customers lack the expertise or resources to effectively manage their security environment on their own and are turning to partners to augment their stack and help solve that problem, Carter said. FireEye therefore plans to take both its Helix platform as well as its network, endpoint, and email offerings and package them in a friendlier way for an MSP to buy and sell to their customer, he said.
FireEye is working now to recruit new managed service-only partners into its solution provider network, Carter said. The offering is also intended to support existing product-centric FireEye partners that are interested in adding managed services to their broader portfolio, according to Carter.