FireEye CTO: We'll play nicely with others in 2017

Security vendor looks to become more accessible to partners and integrate better with other technology

FireEye has pledged to play nicely with others as it continues to reshape its business to be more channel friendly, according to CTO Grady Summers.

FireEye endured a difficult 2016, announcing a wave of job cuts and seeing a number of top executives come and go.

Financial figures released last week showed a slight fall in quarterly revenue for Q4 of last year - the first quarterly decline since it went public in 2013 - while both chairman Dave DeWalt CFO Mike Berry are heading for the exit.

Despite this FireEye's losses narrowed in Q4 and speaking to CRN, Summers claimed FireEye is now in a position to have a positive 12 months.

For the three months ending 31 December 2016 FireEye reported a net loss of $49m, compared to $123.5m in the same period of 2015.

"[2016] was a big year of transition," he said. "[We had] a new CEO, a new head of products with me taking over that, now a new CFO and our chairman moving on - it was certainly a year of transition but it's interesting through all of that how close we came to profitability in the fourth quarter and I think that's a note of optimism to our employees," he said.

"It's cautious optimism but we're absolutely treading in the right direction now."

Friendly FireEye

Grady explained that FireEye has been working on shifting its focus to make its products work better in a cybersecurity ecosystem in 2017, allowing partners to integrate its products with other solutions far more easily.

"The priority for the company is more openness and more of an ecosystem play which I think opens a lot of opportunity for our partners," he said.

"FireEye used to be a fairly proprietary, closed company - we didn't share intelligence, we didn't operate very well in an ecosystem, we didn't take other people's data, we didn't share data collected from our products [but] now we find ourselves in a very different place.

"All of our new products are completely API driven with public APIs accessible to customers; we take in data in our Helix [end-point security] platform from over 300 different third-party sources; our FireEye security orchestrator integrates with 50 third-party products… so it's a very different FireEye in terms of how we work."

Partner promises

While pledging to engage more effectively with other vendors FireEye will also make itself more accessible to partners, Summers added.

FireEye has typically targeted the large enterprise sector and its pricing has reflected this, making it more difficult for smaller resellers to sell into the mid-market. Summers said that this has started to change, particularly with FireEye's cloud products.

"It's a real broadening of what we track," he said. "We used to be known as a company that did state-sponsored target threats and Chinese cyber espionage - we've really broadened that portfolio with our acquisition of iSIGHT Partners a year ago.

"It's a real shift in having a somewhat narrow and deep focus to a much broader type of application.

"We have partners who have historically done well with our product but again, because we were so narrow and deep, we were somewhat limiting the market we could sell into but I think with the broadening of [the portfolio] - more particularly some of the products we have coming - it's a very different landscape for partners."

EMEA

While FireEye has reworked its channel strategy to be more mid-market friendly, EMEA vice president of distribution Jon Kane said this wouldn't necessarily trigger a partner recruitment drive, adding that the focus is to open up FireEye to more of its partners' customers by being more affordabile and versatile.

"In terms of transactions it has typically been a low number of transactions per partner so by having our existing partners go to more of their base, actually it's not about mass recruitment of partners it's making sure the partners have more opportunities with their existing partner base, where [previously] the product set that we had was typically focused on the higher enterprise.

"To be honest across EMEA it is not going to necessarily be bringing on brand new partners."