Channel Post speaks with Amit Roy, executive vice president and regional head for EMEA at Paladion about their strategic move to enter channel and how the company intends to grow its channel business, while retaining the direct business too in the Middle East Africa region.
After all these years, dealing directly with the end-user, what prompted Paladion to take the channel route?
We have a great time directly interacting with end-users, so the channel program for us is to expand our reach only. We want to bring the most effective next-generation cyber security services to everyone who might benefit from improved defenses. The channel route provided us with an opportunity to help even more customers from different segments, so we decided to take it on.
Is Paladion planning to become a 100% channel oriented company, if not, what is your channel strategy and how are you going to manage both the models simultaneously?
Good question. We are not looking to become a 100% channel-oriented company. We will continue to work directly with our Enterprise end users. As such, we are not transforming our strategy so much as augmenting it, to expand our reach to cater to a much wider customer base and a larger territory.
Managing both models will not pose much challenge for us. We are accustomed to managing a broad portfolio of many different clients, different models and each of whom has signed up different services.
What all products or services will be part of your channel portfolio?
We are offering our entire product and service line. Advanced detection and response capabilities will remain at the heart of our portfolio. This includes our flagship AI-driven MDR program, which provides next-generation protection at each stage of a threat’s lifecycle. But we will also continue to offer programs for specific popular platforms (such AWS and Azure), professional services to assist in compliance and every other bespoke program we currently offer.
Middle East Africa is a huge territory, which countries are you planning to target in the initial phase?
MEA is also a territory with many unique cyber security challenges. In addition to facing the global threats, organizations in this region are subjected to a high volume of attacks from politically motivated “hacktivists”.
We have been serving many different countries in this region (GCC as well as East Africa) over the last few years and as part of the channel strategy intend to expand it both in terms of customer base as well as territory. One recent example: we recently launched the region’s first AI-driven SOC in the UAE, and we look forward to creating more in other countries with our key partners.
How many partners do you have onboard and please name a few?
I can tell you that we have had overwhelming response for partnership towards our Managed Detection and Response Service Offering from several resellers, system integrators and even ISPs. We have already on-boarded a few and are still evaluating the right partners for us in the region. We welcome interests from Middle East and Africa resellers and MSPs who want to work with a leader in AI-Driven MDR.
What kind of partners are you looking to engage with?
First and foremost, we are looking for partners who have a realistic perspective on today’s threat landscape. These are partners who understand that traditional and disparate security measures requiring large capex investments may no longer be sufficient for their customers and need specialized platform driven security provider offering advance Threat detection and Response Services in a seamless, easy to deploy, pay as you grow opex model for better security outcomes.
And, on other hand what can partners expect from Paladion?
A comprehensive channel program that will guide them in every step of the sales process with the objective of meeting their customer expectations while ensuring a recurring, profitable business for themselves. Our cyber security offerings are well recognized globally providing 24/7 monitoring, detection and response capabilities with ease of deployment and Cloud ready. We can offer this seamlessly as we operate Security Operations Center in every time zone, staffing over 1,000 of the world’s leading cyber security experts using our proprietary AI platform that does everything 10 times faster than our nearest competitor. This is a unique value proposition that partners will benefit taking to their customers.
What kind of support is Paladion going to offer to its partners and how will you enable your partners to gain business from the market?
The greatest support we offer our partners is a platform driven service that works exactly as said. We are not being flip here. Today’s cyber security marketplace is filled with vendors—whether traditional MSSPs or legacy tech providers—who promise modern security services, but who may not have meaningfully upgraded their programs.
We arm our partners with documented proof, end to end sales and marketing support required to bring that message to the market.
