Through the acquisition of Third Brigade security vendor Trend Micro (TSE: 4704) has set up shop next door to the federal government.
Third Brigade, a firm founded by executives from Entrust Technologies and ZixCorp, was always targeting federal government opportunities.
Trend Micro has had a small presence in the Canadian. Through the years the company opened up various one or two people offices. Since its acquisition of Third Brigade of Ottawa late in 2009 the Canadian office is now up to 50 people. The company now sports a centre of excellence research development lab in Canada.
Together the company believes its can address the government’s wish for virtualization security.
According to Wael Mohamed, the general manager of Trend Micro Canada, the Canadian government has a green initiative for its IT infrastructure through virtualization, but was looking for a solution that would ensure security.
Trend Micro has attained the important CCEAL3 government certification, which addresses virtualized security and is now able to deploy its Deep Security flagship product for server security. Deep Security protects the entire server from operating system, network and applications regardless of virtualization platform. It can also prevent against data breaches whether it is on-premise or in the cloud.
We redesigned this product from protecting the desktop independently to making it all about secure the data and protecting from the inside out, whether you have strong perimeter or not,” Mohamed said.Trend Micro has had a long standing partnership with VMware in providing security for its virtualization products, however Mohamed said that the company will be 100 per cent channel focused and will have no direct selling at all even though he has doubled its internal sales staff recently.
But that same investment made in its sales force was also made for the channel especially for the government market and as well as the banking and insurance verticals, Mohamed said. The company has hired Ian Gordon from IBM to become Trend Micro Canada’s channel chief as part of that investment.
“Today we can say we have sales in all major cities in Canada and we can now better manage the opportunities through business development. We are a 100 per cent channel company and we cannot grow without a close working relationship with the channel,” he added.
Part of the channel strategy for Trend Micro in government and in other markets is for the channel to intersect with some of security provider’s alliance partners such as VMware. Mohamed believes this will help channel partners to extend their value for virtualization and in cloud computing.
This type of strategy can prove to be lucrative for the channel. For example, typical deals will see the solution provider earn 90 cents in security for every dollar they sell of virtualization. Since these solution deals intersect, Mohamed said a partner could get an additional three to four dollars in storage margin for every dollar of virtualization sold.
And, the partnerships keep coming from Trend Micro as they inked an alliance with Wipro Technologies to offer next generation virtualization security solutions for data centres.