This week, the CRN team is gearing up for the biggest event in the channel calendar - the Channel Awards.
One of the distinguished finalists at this year's awards is Armis, which is a contender for Specialist Vendor of the Year.
Here we talk to its VP of worldWide channels, Tim Mackie (pictured) on what has made the business stand out in the market in 2022.
What would winning a CRN Channel Award mean to you?
It's a huge honor and lends some validation that we are doing things right here at Armis. There has been a tonne of forethought and architecting to ensure we are building a world-class Channel Company.
What have been your highlights of 2022 so far?
Over the past year, the APEX Program has grown significantly across the globe.
The Armis channel now services over one-hundred countries worldwide. Over 2,000 sales and technical professionals have been trained and certified since inception, resulting in a 200 per cent increase in partner-identified opportunities.
Armis announced its Armis Partner Experience (APEX) Manage Program in late-October 2022, a purpose-built partner program for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and Managed Detection and Response Providers (MDRs).
The APEX Manage Program is an evolution of the APEX Program launched by Armis one year ago, and aims to elevate and enrich service providers with a modern approach to building cyber investigation, detection, threat hunting, and remediation services across every asset in every environment.
What's the most interesting industry trend you've noticed this year?
Current trading conditions are different to what we saw with COVID, which focused more on getting back to work and doing so safely to bring in renewals, using virtual training tools and carry on with everyday business essentials.
However, what we are seeing now is partners having to completely transform their businesses to survive. This has largely centred around the transition from hardware to software or SaaS.
There is likely no going back from this transition and the hardware market will become more of a fulfilment practice.
Additionally, partners are developing their own services and, therefore, those with the most skilled teams will come out on top.
The skills shortage in cybersecurity is still a massive issue as lack of headcount increases the demand for services or solution wraps, playing very well into partner value capabilities.
The skills shortage makes the market strong in cybersecurity, especially for MSSPs and those partners looking to reduce their business impact risks by developing in-house services for better returns.
Having said this, we know customer budgets are tightening and that translates to increasing requirements for ROI, outcome-driven purchasing decisions and at times, longer, more diligent processes, which will all need to be figured into the sales cycle.
How has your partner strategy evolved in 2022?
This breaks into a couple of categories:
- Program: 2022 saw the execution of phase 1 of the new Armis Partner Experience (APEX); this has just been built on with the launch of APEX Manage in October 2022.
- People: This combined with the architecting and building a channel organization from 5 channel professionals worldwide to over 20, with another 15 in supporting roles.
- Process: We also invested a lot of time and effort in building the best operational visibility to the business that I have ever had at my fingertips. This helps us track attribution and enables us to focus investments.
- Partners: We migrated hundreds of partners into the new program, and have trained thousands of both sales and technical resources. We have evolved the training curriculum from some basic intro classes to now more sophisticated offerings around deployments and services. We continue to evolve.
What are you most looking forward to about 2023?
2022 has been an amazing year and tremendous success, but 2023 is our year. Now, it's about continued expansion and execution.
This, to me, is the fun part.
What we have needed, for the most part, is now built or getting built. It's about capturing more market-share and creating value drivers for our partner community. We're very optimistic headed into 2023.
