Big (But Not Surprising) Plans from the New Channel Chief at Sophos
Not surprising to Channelholic readers, anyway, who know well why ecosystems, marketplaces, and MSPs loom large in Chris Bell’s thinking.
TD SYNNEX isn’t the only channel player sold on the power of community. The new channel chief at Sophos is bought in too.
“It’s very difficult to get to the MSP market in the channel without a strong community,” says Chris Bell (pictured), the security vendor’s senior vice president of global channels, alliances, and corporate development since February. “Enablement across the MSP community is how MSPs grow.”
Hence the recent move of Scott Barlow, formerly VP of global MSP and cloud alliances, into the newly created role of chief evangelist and global head of community.
“Scott’s going to be leading many of our enablement activities and our enablement strategy for MSPs, and ensuring that they have what they need to be successful,” Bell says.
Prior to assuming his current post, Bell was chief strategy officer at Secureworks, the MDR specialist Sophos officially acquired two months ago. Many of his thoughts and plans for the future, including his faith in community, echo recurring themes familiar to regular Channelholic readers:
1. Ecosystems. As analyst Jay McBain of Canalys will happily tell you, businesses are increasingly combining products and services from an ecosystem of companies with specialized, complementary expertise when building solutions. Bell is well aware of that phenomenon and building it into his plans for the future.
“Just like we have a breadth of portfolio, we are going to have a breadth of routes to market,” he says. “You will see us lean in with our cyber insurers as an example, you’ll see us lean in with our marketplace partners, and you’re going to see us lean in with GSIs.”
2. Marketplaces. Big dollars are flowing through online marketplaces today and the numbers are only growing, from $45 billion this year to $85 billion in 2028, according to Canalys. Bell intends (very much in alignment with my advice on the topic) to support every such site its partners care about.
“Our stance is we’re going to meet you where you’re going to evolve your business,” he says. “We have integrations with all the top distribution marketplaces as well as the MSP marketplaces, and we have a growing practice around the hyperscaler marketplaces like AWS Marketplace as well as Azure.”
Sophos will invest in enhancing those integrations this year and beyond to ensure that partners have access to more of the same usage data and other telemetry non-marketplace buyers can view already.
3. MSPs as MVPs. We recently explained in four crisp bullet points why so many security vendors are investing so much money in MSPs right now, and further explained in that and another recent story why that’s extra true of MDR vendors like N-able and ESET.
As well as Sophos, which has over 29,000 MDR customers at present. “We’re growing at over 37% every year,” Bell says. “It’s the fastest-growing space for our business.” MSPs are the number one reason why.
“If we continue to lean into our MSP route to market, which is our fastest-growing route to market, that’s going to be a great way for us to sell more MDR as well as enable MSPs to build their own MDR service offerings,” Bell says.
4. Vendor consolidation. Though the numbers shifted ever so slightly in the opposite direction last year, MSPs are doing more business with fewer vendors these days than they have in years. Bell has this trend squarely in view too and understands that Sophos must work harder to earn and retain partner loyalty as a result of it.
“You have to add value across the entire life cycle,” he says, including in the form of beefed-up partner program benefits.
“They expect to be rewarded, whether it be with MDF, rebates, or trying to give enablement in a specific fashion that works for their businesses,” Bell observes. “You’re going to hear a lot more from that arena as we continue to evolve our partner programs.”
Partner satisfaction looms larger in a world of limited vendor relationships too. Bell’s plan there includes rolling out an updated (dare I say Ingram Micro-esque) partner portal with more self-serve functionality.
“Many of our partners prefer not to pick up the phone and call their channel account manager,” Bell notes. “They just want to do it on their own.”
Innovation like that isn’t cheap, but it’s cheaper in the long run than losing choosy partners who have more options—and leverage—when selecting vendors than before.
“Competition in any environment is a great thing because it forces everyone to up their games,” Bell observes. “That’s what will create the best security outcome for customers, if the entire cybersecurity ecosystem is upping their games.”