Moscow – Kaspersky Lab’s director of marketing Roger Wilson told CDN at the New Horizons conference that ThreatPost.com, an IT security information, blogging and partner collaboration Web site will make its way to Canada.
Wilson did not give a timetable for a Canadian launch, but it’s expect to arrive early in 2010.
ThreatPost was started in the U.S. as an adjunct to Kaspersky’s Green Team channel program to heighten awareness of security and cyber crime.
What makes ThreatPost different from other viral Web sites is that Kaspersky has handed content control to two IT industry journalists: Ryan Naraine, formerly of eWeek and Dennis Fisher, formerly of TechTarget.
According to Wilson, the security community does not want to be pitched to by a vendor. They along with channel partners are looking for unbiased information and a way to make deeper connections with other security experts.
“I pay for ThreatPost from headquarters (in Moscow) and I let the U.S. guys build the community in the same way as Linkedin. In the U.S. market we need to be ahead of the game and now I think we are ready to take it to Latin America and Canada and then maybe Asia. Each region will have local content,” Wilson said.
The idea for ThreatPost came during the last U.S. general election. Kaspersky’s digital marketing team was looking at the Huffington Post and they way the Web site gets expert bloggers to compliment the online articles and thought the same could be done for security.
“We thought lets give it a try and if it doesn’t work we’ll stop it. The numbers looked good and it’s growing all the time and we are now getting some famous bloggers to be part of it. Because it’s not overtly Kaspersky it attracts neutrality,” Wilson said.
Some of Threatpost bloggers are Nick Selby of Threat Risk Management and Eugene Kaspersky himself.
At last year’s RSA conference, Kaspersky launched ThreatPost as a blog centre. Wilson said that bloggers are on the edge and have traditionally not been a part of the journalistic community. ThreatPost offered bloggers an avenue to voice their opinions and ideas.
For the channel, Wilson believes that ThreatPost can be a conduit for partner-to-partner collaboration. “This can be a place for more information and a deeper connection for all security VARs,” he added.
Wilson said as Kaspersky enters the enterprise market it will be key to get closer to channel partners. Kaspersky will be targeting much bigger partners than ever before across many geographies. Those partners will be looking for help with security solutions for customers. “We are expanding our channel and that will be a big challenge,” he said.
Kaspersky has also created a social networking fan club with an eye to get more channel partners on board. Currently the fan club has 852,000 fans, Wilson said.