Trend Micro vows to make partners' lives easier

Interim channel director Gavin Lyons says ensuring partners are satisfied with their interaction with vendor is his top priority

Trend Micro's interim channel head is aiming to improve partners' experience of interacting with the security vendor.

UK and Ireland sales director Gavin Lyons (pictured) is running Trend Micro's channel until at least December, following the departure of Caroline Hodson in May.

Lyons likened his role to that of a Formula One pit crew chief.

"Caroline did a wonderful job of promoting the value of IT security to those partners," he said. "My job is to take it to the next level of detail to ensure that, when they come into the garage, they are satisfied with their interaction with Trend.

"We need to look at where we could be improving our systems, whether our teams are structured in the right way and whether we can make things more efficient."

Lyons joined Trend in 2008 as a result of its acquisition of Identum and has since run the vendor's email encryption, SI & MSP and enterprise sales teams.

A decision will be made on whether the channel and sales director roles are split out again at the end of the year, but Lyons argued that it makes sense to have them under one management umbrella.

"My view is that having one person with full visibility of channel and sales is phenomenal," he said. "I would love to do the job. If you look at where Trend is in terms of virtualisation and cloud, and investment in the consumer brand, the opportunity is incredible so whoever gets that job will be in a good position."

Lyons also promised that Trend would help partners to combat shrinking margins in the end-point security space.

"Today, we launch an incredibly aggressive pricing promotion on end-point security," he said. "The average margin available to resellers is now 30 per cent if they do it right and register deals. It is very competitive at an end-point level and we can either sit back and let it happen, or come out with offers that make partners competitive in that space, which is what we want to do."