ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Building Trend Micro’s
channel in Saudi Arabia
Trend Micro is building an end-to-end partner programme
in Saudi Arabia, to be rolled out across the region, with
managed service providers, cloud service providers, and
system integrators being key players. By Arun Shankar.
T
he Trend Micro partner
programme consists of four
reseller categories including
Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, from top
to down. It also has specialised partner
categories including professional services,
cloud service providers, managed service
providers, and system integrators. While
reseller partners can sign-up online into
the various categories, specialised partners
need to sign an agreement to evaluate
their industry focus and technical skills
capabilities. The partner programme also
allows channel partners to specialise in
various areas including Small Business
Security, User Protection, Hybrid Cloud
Security, Network Defense.
Trend Micro solutions cover the full
range of end users from single user to
small, medium and large enterprises.
The end user segments, products and
solutions, and the types of partners in
the channel programme should have a
good overlap. For a consumer the best
channel partner may be a telecom operator
providing managed services, and a system
integrator may be the best channel partner
for enterprise driven projects.
“Our partner programmes are covering
all the partner teams. The beauty about
our channel programmes is that they
cover the end to end environment when
16
Since security
is no longer
an option for
many small
and medium
organisations,
there is now
an increasing
demand for
managed
services delivery
to meet their
expectations.
it comes to the channel. We cater towards
resellers, system integrators, cloud service
providers, and managed service providers.
All of these are part of the ecosystem
that we work with and each has its own
specialised field,” explains Dr Moataz Bin
Dr Moataz Bin Ali, Vice President and
Managing Director, Trend Micro, Middle East
and Africa.
Ali, Vice President and Managing Director,
Trend Micro, Middle East and Africa.
Managed service provider
Amongst the Trend Micro channel partner
categories, the managed services provider
is of particular importance. The Saudi
Vision 2030 places particular emphasis
on diversification of revenues inside the
country. What diversification means is that
it allows businesses to basically look for
new sources of revenue. And the business
model of a managed services provider for
example, meets this requirement.
A managed services provider is an
entity that has the potential to take its
security environment to the next level,
based on its skills expertise, and provide it
as a service to other end users. A managed
service provider would therefor support
Saudi Arabia’s vision of diversification of
resources. “This is something that we are
uniquely positioning and we are uniquely
aligning with a lot of organisations in the
country,” says Dr Ali.
Professional services, a newly
introduced channel category in the Trend
Micro partner programme, supports
implementation, and is targeted at the
large enterprise. Managed services on the
other hand, targets the small and medium
enterprises, who are typically short of
Issue 16
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS