'Noisy neighbour' Cylance turns up the volume in EMEA

Directors have joined from LogRhythm and Intel Security as the vendor's partner programme is set to launch next month

End-point security vendor Cylance is set to launch its new EMEA partner programme next month after snaring two directors from rival security vendors.

Anton Grashion has joined from Intel Security as senior director of product marketing, after Stuart Quinsey quietly joined as EMEA channel director from LogRhythm earlier this year.

Evan Davidson also joined from FireEye in March as vice president of EMEA sales.

Cylance launched into Europe in March and Grashion, who said his decision to leave Intel Security was not related to its prospective sale, told CRN that Cylance is causing disruption in the antivirus (AV) sector - something he claims has not been done for decades.

"The AV market hasn't had a massive amount of innovation the last 20 years," he said.

"We've tinkered round the edges - made it better, more efficient and added a whole pile of other technologies that cooperate with it, but from my perspective Cylance really is innovating in the space. We're the noisy neighbours.

"It's very different from previous roles," he added. "I was in two very large companies [Intel Security and Juniper Networks] for the last 13 years so it's very much roll your sleeves up and what needs to be done needs to be done."

Cylance uses artificial intelligence technology to prevent cyber threats, and operates a 100 per cent channel strategy globally.

Quinsey joined after five years at LogRhythm and told CRN that Cylance's EMEA partner programme will launch next month.

In the UK Cylance has around 20 top-tier partners, and around 30 partners who are "in the courting phase".

"One of the great things about the technology is the scale," Quinsey said. "Some new vendors when they start are going from the top down or from the bottom up, but we can scale from the smallest to the largest.

"Our largest deployment global is hundreds of thousands and the net of that is that you do have a broader appeal to more partners, whether it's MSSPs, SIs, or scaling down to our referral partners, so we can deal with the smaller partners who are slightly less transactional."

Ignition was signed up as Cylance's first UK distributor last October, and chief strategy officer Sean Remnant told CRN that partners have to convince end users that Cylance does what it says it can do.

"I haven't seen anything grow as fast as this, with the activity around it - it's phenomenal," he said.

"The problem that they solve is that there is a pent-up demand for something that actually works. It doesn't take a genius to see, with the amount of ransomware hits the customers are seeing, the existing solutions today aren't working.

"I think there's always some scepticism when you're making such bold claims. The industry has been burned over the years, but what we're getting our partners to do is just to get their customers to test it, to prove it works."