CYREN hunts VARs for rip-and-replace mission

Former Check Point and Websense duo Atif Ahmed and Zoe Clark hunting for resellers to help swap out secure web gateway appliances with CYREN's cloud offering

CYREN's new EMEA vice president is looking for more partners for its security-as-a-service and cloud solutions, while also "rationalising" current partners.

Atif Ahmed started at CYREN this month, having previously held vice president roles at AppSense and Websense, and worked as a sales manager at Check Point.

"My role is all about driving the business forwards," he said. "We want to go and be extremely disruptive in the EMEA market, focusing primarily on the appliance-based, secure web gateway market. We are looking to rip and replace those with CYREN cloud web security."

The vendor saw a net loss of $0.8m (£0.6m) on revenues which increased 12 per cent year on year to $7.6m in the three months ending 30 June 2016.

Since being employed by the vendor, Ahmed has hired a new EMEA channel director, Zoe Clark, who worked with Ahmed at AppSense, Websense and Check Point. Ahmed said Clark will be responsible for recruiting partners and creating a partner programme for CYREN.

The cloud-based security vendor is looking for partners who have experience in security-as-a-service and cloud-based security, according to Ahmed.

"We will be identifying new partners who are willing to work with us and understand security-as-a-service and the cloud offering we provide," he explained. "Rather than the appliance-based market which some of the companies I have worked with in the past have adopted."

Ahmed said he is also looking to "rationalise" the partners the firm currently has by organising them, with one possibility being a tiered system.

"We have quite a few partners, but what we are looking to do is focus and hone it down into more partners who can specialise and understand how they can be more profitable with security-as-a-service," he added. "In the past we recruited a lot of partners into the EMEA space but there was no real organisation of those partners; no clearly defined partner programme.

Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said the security-as-a-service space is a good place for CYREN to be because it is continuing to grow as more organisations look to third parties to control their security.

"Doing security-as-a-service has been evolving for some time," he said. "Some aspects of security are well suited to being run by a third party off-site. SaaS has a lot going for it, particularly as it is something that has to work 24/7. You can't rely on end users to keep it up to date, or even IT professionals because they are so pressed keeping everything else running."