Infinigate places bet on FireEye competitor LastLine

Distributor says recent deal it helped Lastline strike with UK bank helped prove the saleability of its malware defence technology

Infinigate has inked a distribution deal with FireEye competitor Lastline after spending the last 12 months helping to prove the market for the malware detection start-up.

Infinigate UK managing director Murray Pearce claimed Lastline can beat FireEye on both price and performance, but admitted it was too early for them to need a distributor when the duo began chatting a year ago.

"When they entered the market, we agreed to work with them informally," he said. "We've done a few things to support them and recommend a few partners and have got to the point where we're really comfortable with the technology and value proposition."

Lastline has amassed a "handful" of UK customers, Pearce said. This includes a large banking customer Infinigate helped it win, a deal which Pearce said helped "prove the saleability of technology".

Despite competing with malware detection specialists such as FireEye and Vectra, as well as Trend Micro's Deep Security, Lastline offers partners a couple of key differentiators, Pearce said.

This includes the technology itself, which is available as a cloud or on-premise solution and last year won plaudits from NSS Labs for having a 100 per cent breach detection rate and also finished top on one of the two axis of a Forrester Wave report, Pearce said.

"We put it in front of our enterprise customers and they told us it was catching things they weren't expecting. They also have a good channel programme and channel ethos," Pearce said.

Pearce also argued Lastline is in a strong position to capitalise on the recent woes of market goliath FireEye, which had to restructure last year after expanding too quickly.

"FireEye has been quite impactful in the market, but there is definitely room for other technologies alongside that," he said. "It has run into a few issues. It expanded extremely quickly and is quite an expensive solution. Lastline is better quality, and less expensive, and in terms of being a sustainable partnership is a good long-term bet."

Founded in 2011 California-based Lastline has worked with UK distributors, including Cloud Distribution, in the past, but Pearce said the UK market is only now ready for it.

"They approached us fairly early on, actually too early for distribution," he said. "They had really good technology, but we wanted to see how they developed over a period of time. We went on that journey with them, which is not something we've done that often with vendors."