Trend Micro lays out managed services opportunity at its World Tour event in Sydney

Trend Micro talked up the opportunity for partners to help customers bridge security skills gaps at its Risk to Resilience World Tour in Sydney last week.

At the event, which drew around 150 attendees to Sydney’s The Ivy, the vendor’s Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) field CTO Mick McCluney laid out the need for organisations to address skills shortages by “outsourcing to MSPs or MSSPs or managed XDR (extended detection and response) services, noting ”31 percent of [organisations] said [they] don’t have enough people, resources, tools, visibility."

Trend Micro offers managed XDR services through its MSSP partner program, which is built around its Trend Vision One platform.

ANZ MD Srujan Talakokkula told CRN Australia the program has achieved “almost 60 percent year on year growth” in the region.

“We know that customers can’t find the skills they’re after, so…anything tooling wise, whatever we release will have a service attached to it…that's completely driven through our partner ecosystem,” he said.

Changes ahead for ANZ

Talakokkula said Trend Micro has close to 210 employees in ANZ, which is “something we foresee growing and there's a lot of other investment that we are currently taking on board to get a new channel director in place and grow the team as well.”

He also announced Trend Vision One will receive IRAP certification “in the next few weeks” and that the platform’s threat intelligence capabilities will launch in June 2024.

“I can see the pipeline is growing quite a lot and the partners are really happy about it because we have a very broad breadth of platform with Trend Vision One which does not just solve one use case; we solve 14 use cases,” Talakokkula said.

Trend Vision One offers attack surface management and XDR capabilities in addition to cloud, endpoint, network, email and OT security.

Talakokkula noted customers “are looking for the consolidation.”

“…there are 200 or 300 cybersecurity tooling vendors out in the market, and the market is so confused in order to understand what is the right vendor and the right partners we need to partner with in the long term,” he said.

“If [Trend Vision One] is adopted by the customer through a partner, the partner’s expansion is quite natural because of the use cases that we solve.”

“Why is it important? Because the customers are looking for the consolidation; they don't want too many tools, they want better outcomes, faster outcomes and obviously they want to save costs.”