Sophos enabling partners with solutions and trainings to meet customer needs during the pandemic

A vendor partner relationship is most crucial when it comes to meeting challenges faced by their customers. Presently, all the businesses are facing cyber security challenges due to the new normal - Work From Home (WFH) which organizations are forced to adopt because of the global pandemic, COVID-19. Sophos with its partner community and products are safeguarding their customers in this remote work environment where the chance of cyber breach increased manifold due to unprotected network.

A 100% channel focused company – Sophos puts its partners at the centre in whatever they do. Its extensive global partner channel is the key differentiator for the company. With its huge partner ecosystem the company has been able to address customer challenges in the time of pandemic. Talking about the channel policy and how the company is helping its partners to meet the customer demands during the critical time of pandemic, Sunil Sharma, Managing Director- Sales (India & SAARC), Sophos says, “Sophos is a 100 percent channel focused cybersecurity company. We put our partners first in everything we do-from sales, marketing and support through to product development. Our extensive global partner channel is a key strategic asset for Sophos and remains a key differentiator.

The core things around which we design our channel policy are:

• Partner Profitability:

Our channel policy rewards commitment. The more partners are committed to Sophos, more profitability they can achieve. We provide tiered discounts aligned to respective partner tiers: Authorized Partner, Silver Partner, Gold Partner, Platinum Partner and Sub-Distributors. These discounts help partners built their profitability on consistent bases.

• Margin Retention Opportunities:

We give much importance to secure our partners’ efforts in our channel policy. Deal Registration and Incumbency are the arrangements to provide margin retention for our partners. Deal Registration helps partners to secure upsell, cross sell and new customer opportunities. Incumbency helps them to secure their renewing customers.

• Technical Enablement: We emphasize on training partners to increase their technical abilities to secure their customers. Sophos provides certification for each important role at partner companies: Certified Sales Consultant, Certified Engineer, Certified Architect and Certified Technician.

Engaging with Partners & Customers

Pandemic has changed one thing categorically that it has changed the physical platforms to virtual. Earlier we had physical meetings with customers and partners, physical webinars, customer roadshows, partner conferences. But during this pandemic time everything has changed to virtual platform. Many people is of the opinion that there is a lot of time saving but at the same time a lot of customers believe that until they meet the vendor physically they do not enjoy the discussion. Today, the new normal has been set up and people are enjoying it.

Sophos addressing customer challenges

Sophos has been doing a lot of work and supporting its customers through over 3000 partner network in the country. The first requirement in work from home scenario is a secured connection from anywhere, so we established the VPN connectivity between remote employees and organization servers. The client VPN enables on their devices and with the help of our XG Firewall we have IPsec or SSL kind of VPN which we enabled for our customers. Second, on end points customers were using our solutions and we have upgraded them from plain antivirus to anti-ransomware. So when you are using anti-ransomware and InterceptX, what we did is we deployed synchronised security with the XG Firewall and that helped to eliminate any kind of attack happening on a particular remote device. It is synchronised security which has actually protected so many customers and all IT Managers were happy to see the central dashboard and with this they can identify the malicious attack which has happened on a particular device, how it went into quarantine zone and how the same device became healthy and come back as a healthy device to the network.

Partner ecosystem

We have over 3000 partners in India and SAARC. I can proudly say that approximately over 25000 customers have been protected with the help of Sophos solutions which we have in the last four to five years and they are very happy with the solutions. I feel proud that the job which we are into - protecting the most precious customer data from cyber criminals. So that is a proud feeling for all of the Sophos employees.”