The SMAs and Performanta - meet the contenders

We speak to CEO of MSP Performanta, Guy Golan about his group's achievements in the last year and what it means to be nominated for the SMAs 2023

Only three days remain until CRN's Sales and Marketing Awards 2023 at Leonardo Royal Hotel, Tower Bridge.

As we prepare to find out the winners at this year's ceremony on Thursday 29 June, we meet some of the contenders.

This year Performanta have made the shortlist for two awards - Best New Business Win in the reseller category, and Best Company to work for - Sub £100m turnover.

Guy Golan, Performanta CEO and co-founder, has led the group since 2011 and heads up its culture, vision, strategy, and global expansion, pioneering modern cyber security solutions to organisations worldwide.

Renowned for leading cyber safety, the disruptive global approach for digital protection, Golan has fast become a prominent industry speaker across the globe. He focuses on building sustainable and mutually beneficial relationships with both customers and partners, giving him a deep understanding of the ever evolving and dynamic needs of the information security landscape.

Why do you think awards like the SMAs matter? What would winning this award mean to your company?

This award will carry a great weight both as a stamp of recognition from CRN, a renowned media platform, and as a springboard to Performanta.

We are relatively new into the UK market and would like to be recognised for the quality and the way we can impact the market in a positive way.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

To truly evangelise and create a safe environment to our ecosystem across the globe. Our Purple Tribe members are working tirelessly to ensure our clients are safe. Through our alignment with Microsoft Security, we have managed to accelerate our mission and grow our impact on the market.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2023 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

The proliferation of incidents in the market was one of our biggest challenges, from dealing with maximum two incidents monthly to more than four incidents at a grand scale was tough.

We overcame it thanks to our Safe Platform that reached a higher level of maturity and operations. As a result, a task that normally takes days is completed within hours.

The team helped immensely, from the ability to feed the system with genuine and accurate use cases so those can be automated, to the dev team that managed to make the safe platform more inclusive and more effective.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

The channel is continuing to evolve - distributors are selling services and going direct. Resellers are trying to provide managed services. Vendors are bypassing both. Quite disruptive.

In my view, the market needs more collaboration between different companies, thus completing the offering to create a safer place. Costs should drop. We need to challenge the notion that cyber is expensive just because it is cyber. Partnerships will help quite a bit to bring more stability into the channel.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

The emergence of partnerships, as mentioned in the previous point poses opportunities. Providers are realising the true purpose of their role and if they want to buy, borrow, or build. Such realisation provides us the ability to serve the channel in a much more comprehensive, effective, impactful, and cost-effective manner.