Forcepoint's EMEA boss: 'We want to protect partner margins through deal registration'

Ben Richardson reveals plans for 'flatter' discount structure, stronger protection for Bronze-level partners and remaining a stable vendor in an increasingly saturated security market

Forcepoint says it's going to impose a flatter discount structure through changes to deal registration as it looks to better protect the margins of its smaller partners.

The US data protection vendor's EMEA boss, Ben Richardson told CRN's sister publication CPI the change will be towards a "flatter" model with a stronger emphasis on deal registration.

"Without going into too much detail at the moment, what we want to do is protect margin for partners through deal registration. At the moment, we have a staggered structure of discounts that different partner levels get. What we want to do is move towards maybe a slightly flatter structure." He said.

"It will give a Bronze partner that might only want to transact with us once or twice a year more protection from a Platinum partner that might just come in and try and win the deal at the last minute."

Richardson says Forcepoint works with two distributors in every country, choosing a larger player for breadth, and a smaller niche specialist to give partners more choice in each market.

This won't change, but also on the cards is new investment in more channel account managers across Forcepoint's top EMEA markets, including the UK and Germany.

However, Richardson said he has no plans to make sweeping changes.

In his view, partners don't want vendors to make too many changes in a security market that is already saturated with an ever increasing number of solutions and partner programmes.

He referenced Broadcom's merger with Symanctec as an example.

"There's a lot of noise. There's so many vendors out there. It used to be a case of the large will swallow the small. And you'll see that a little bit, you'll always get the big vendors eating up. But as we've seen with Symantec and Broadcom, sometimes they get swallowed as well.

"What we've got is a platform plan. So we're absolutely a single point solution, a single offering, rather than having to go to lots of different vendors and pick and choose what you want out there."

He added: "It's a complex world out there. We're loyal to our partners and our partners are loyal to us at the moment. So we hope to keep it that way."

Part of that closer connection with partners has been strengthened by a training.

Richardson says the vendor has trained more partner engineers in Q3 than in the entirety of 2019.

He pointed to COVID-19 as a catalyst for 2020 being the year of the channel "skilling-up".

"I appreciate circumstances being as they are that people have potentially had a bit more time to do training," he said.

"But these investments are really, really strong. And really that goes back to that customer satisfaction base."

Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Forcepoint has 4,500 partners worldwide, a figure Richardson says has remained steady throughout the year, despite the pandemic.

However, 2020 did see the vendor lose a distribution partner from its network early on: Nuvias.

In March, the VAD announced it had cut Forcepoint from its EMEA portfolio, issuing a statement to CPI that the decision was made "due to diverging strategic priorities from both parties".

Seven months on, Richardson says the relationship wasn't on solid ground from the start.

"I think we both worked out after a while it just wasn't working together. We spent a bit of energy and a bit of time trying to get that going and it didn't really take off. So we just kind of shook hands, walked away as friends and focused on other areas," he said.

"I don't think anyone actually sat down and wrote a business plan together and understood what we're trying to get out on this relationship."

Moving forwards, Richardson says his 2021 planning is focusing on getting a clearer distribution strategy to make sure that kind of mismatch doesn't happen again.

"There's a lot of focus we're now putting on making sure we're driving the relationship in the right direction both ways with whichever distributor we're working with. I think before there were a lot of assumptions made on both sides.

"We're going through that in our new distribution programme that we plan to launch early next year."