Staying On The Right Path: Partner Enablement Needs To Be A ‘Continuous Journey’
Today it’s more important than ever that MSSPs receive the training, on-boarding, support and tools they need as the ever-evolving cybersecurity industry gets more complex and crowded.
“With MSSPs, it’s a lot different than just on-boarding a reseller partner,” said Francisco Criado, vice president of global partner ecosystems at Check Point.
Recognizing this, however, has been crucial to making MSSPs the fastest-growing partner type for Check Point currently, according to Criado. It has led the Tel Aviv, Israel-based vendor to tailor its MSSP enablement by, for instance, developing templates that provide the majority of what the partner will need to deliver a managed service.
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The MSSP partner can then add their IP and services on top of it and ultimately get to market faster with the managed service offering, Criado said.
For West Seneca, N.Y.-based CyFlare, which began its partnership with Check Point about 18 months ago, there’s no question that the vendor has been making smart moves around enablement that have led to growth in the partnership right out of the gate, according to CyFlare founder and CEO Joe Morin.
“Everybody [in the cybersecurity industry] says, ‘We have all this enablement. Our team is here whenever you need us,’” Morin said. “Almost every one of them is lying. Maybe not outright lies, but they’re certainly lacking on the delivery of it.”
Check Point’s efforts on enablement, on the other hand, have brought a legitimately “channel-centric” approach, he said. “It’s refreshing.”
Partner enablement, which includes on-boarding and training as well as delivery of ongoing resources, tools and support, has always been obligatory and required a major commitment from technology vendors. But in recent interviews with CRN, channel chiefs at cybersecurity vendors representing a variety of segments and sizes pointed to partner enablement as an increasingly important area of focus and investment in 2025 due to a variety of factors.
Those include the massive complexity of the cybersecurity space as well as the crowded vendor marketplace, both of which have led partners to favor vendors with streamlined enablement.
Partners have a wide array of vendors to choose from, and enablement can be a key differentiator when done right, solution provider executives told CRN.
With several thousand cybersecurity vendors currently in the market, security is “not getting less complex,” said John Hurley, CRO at Denver-based Optiv, No. 28 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025. “And there are always more players coming in to solve some niche that’s out there that needs to be solved.”
As a result, then, “the [vendors] that are lacking in enablement probably won’t show up on that radar screen for us as effectively,” Hurley said.
Meanwhile, the ongoing shift by many VARs to adopt managed services around security—and even in some cases become full-fledged MSSPs—is another key reason why enablement is even more critical for cybersecurity vendors than in the past, vendor and partner executives said.
Cybersecurity vendors can go to great lengths to develop highly differentiated, partner-friendly products and still struggle in the channel if enablement is not enough of a priority, said Alpesh Shah, vice president of security strategic alliances at New York-based Myriad360, No. 110 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.
“At the end of the day, if they don’t go and enable partners, all that effort is of no use,” Shah said.
For cybersecurity vendors that are looking to effectively enable partners in 2025, the growing emphasis on managed services has helped to turn the concept of continuous enablement into a central theme, including at WatchGuard Technologies.
With such a large number of partners having expanded in recent years from a resale focus to a business model that also includes providing services, ongoing enablement beyond the initial on-boarding and training is essential, said Michelle Welch, CMO and senior vice president of business strategy at Seattle-based WatchGuard.
“Helping the MSPs to build that skill set, build that confidence and make that transformation is critical,” Welch said.
The vendor is now providing several dedicated teams—including technical account managers and deployment teams—to ensure ongoing support to partners beyond just offering presales training.
This approach recognizes that many partners are seeking to “sell with” their security vendors and thus are looking to have continued engagement throughout the customer life cycle, Welch said.
In particular, VARs that are moving into the MSP or MSSP space are looking for continued support from security vendors such as from technical account managers, said Hal Libby, general manager of managed services at WatchGuard.
Such partners often find this can help with the inevitable challenges encountered as they gain proficiency as a provider of managed services, Libby said. Technical account managers are available to “build a relationship directly with the partner” and help with any technical needs they might have, he said.
Without a doubt, WatchGuard has been “very generous with technical training,” said Neil Holme, founder and CEO of Impact Business Technology, an MSP and longtime WatchGuard partner based in Sandy Hook, Conn. And the same is true when it comes to enablement around sales and marketing, he said.
As an example, Impact hired its first marketing staff member several years ago, who was relatively new to the field. WatchGuard’s marketing support team actually played a leading role in helping to train the staffer, Holme said.
“WatchGuard has been alongside her—mentoring her, building up her skills, working through campaigns, helping her learn, helping her succeed,” he said. “It’s just an example of how WatchGuard sees that their success is tied to our success. They know what they’ve got to do, and they go to that level of effort to help us succeed.”
At SentinelOne, Brian Lanigan, senior vice president of global partner ecosystem, said there’s no question that enablement needs to be a “continuous journey” and must be built as a “core engine.”
“That need is huge and never-ending,” he said. “There is no spiking the football in the end zone and saying ‘we’re done’ with partner enablement.”
One major area of investment for enablement at SentinelOne over the past year has been on enhancing the content available to partners from the product marketing organization. A major takeaway, Lanigan said, has been that the content needs to feature different messages for different partner business models.
SentinelOne has also excelled when it comes to providing targeted enablement across the different relevant teams within a solution provider business, said Jared Crowley, senior director of partner software and security sales at Somerset, N.J.-based SHI International, No. 12 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025.
Too often, security vendors will overly focus on enabling the sales side of the partner business and within that, many vendors will disproportionately cater to the sales leadership, Crowley said.
“That’s just not going to move the needle,” he said. “The salespeople who are in the trenches every day having conversations with customers—that’s where the enablement needs to hit.”
The best way for a vendor to provide enablement for sales partnerships is to begin with a direct sales-to-sales collaboration—in this case, with a SentinelOne sales rep and an SHI rep working together on a deal, Crowley said.
Through that process, the SHI rep gains knowledge and experience organically, he said. And once a deal is won, both reps can share the success story with their broader teams, Crowley said. “That is how you get the sales momentum rolling,” he added.
But many sales conversations inevitably lead to a selection process and “that’s when the technical enablement really becomes paramount,” he said. “The salesperson is not going to try to answer that question.”
Overall, even for security vendors with strong track records on product like SentinelOne, prioritizing partner enablement is essential, Crowley said.
“In order for us to find partner-sourced business, and do that well, we absolutely need enablement,” he said.
At Zscaler, Anthony Torsiello, senior vice president of partnerships and alliances, said the company has placed an increasing emphasis over the past year on providing partners with the same resources as their own sales force to provide the best possible experience for partners and customers.
Its efforts have included ensuring that partners have access to the same tools, systems and resources as internal employees, said Torsiello,. The company has also set up its teams for partner enablement, go-to-market enablement and internal delivery to all report into one enablement leader—further ensuring that partner enablement is effective and consistent, he said.
Initial results from the efforts have shown that customers who are served by effectively enabled partners have often expanded beyond the initial product to adopt additional products on the vendor’s security platform within six to 12 months, according to Torsiello.
Key efforts at ensuring equivalent enablement for partners and Zscaler’s own sales team have included the vendor’s unique partnership with SecureDynamics, a value-added distributor that specializes in offering training for Zscaler products, according to Kevin Peterson, general manager at San Jose, Calif.-based SecureDynamics and a former Zscaler director.
The SecureDynamics trainings are run the same as Zscaler itself would run them, but are available to partners of all sizes, including small MSPs, Peterson said.
When it comes to partner enablement, Zscaler’s support for strong training “shows they get it—and they’ve been totally committed to the channel community,” he said.
At the earlier-stage level, Tel Aviv, Israel-based cybersecurity startup Torq has invested heavily in training due to the fact that many account reps and presales engineers have not been previously exposed to the security “hyperautomation” technology they offer, said Sheldon Muir, head of global channels and alliances at Torq.
The startup has also emphasized human interactions during the on-boarding process, with a preference for in-person or Zoom conversations that can acquaint the partners not only with the product but also with the history and current landscape in their category, Muir said.
“People want to do business with people,” he said. “You just can’t replace the dialogue between people and the trust that people build by doing business with one another.”
In this regard, Torq has absolutely been practicing what it preaches, said Rich Douros, CRO at Defy Security, a Canonsburg, Pa.-based Torq partner. The company has demonstrated a “consistency of being in front of us—training and enabling us—in a number of different ways,” Douros said.
With many other security vendors, he said, the interactions from the vendor side are only sporadic and not nearly as thoughtful—and yet the vendor will inevitably ask, “‘How come you guys aren’t selling my stuff?’”
“It’s like, ‘Well, you’re not consistently in front of us, engaging with us—[for instance] informing us when you won a piece of business on a certain use case,’” Douros said. “That consistency of being in front of us and building those relationships and mindshare allows that tight collaboration.”
Security vendor channel chiefs who spoke with CRN noted that there is no one-size-fits-all approach for training and enablement that will apply to all partners.
For instance, while some partners are looking for personalized or one-on-one training sessions, others are content with on-demand learning online, noted Karl Soderlund, global channel chief at Tel Aviv, Israel-based Cato Networks.
“They learn in different ways,” Soderlund said, and a big part of being successful at training and enablement is “having that flexibility to understand how people digest information.”
Sophos, meanwhile, is focusing on offering “fast-track” training options for partners that will deliver training modules in a half-hour or less, said Chris Bell, senior vice president of channels, alliances and global development at Abingdon, U.K.-based Sophos.
Partners “need that information in a consumable fashion,” Bell said. “Sitting down for two or three days [for a certification] is not as consumable.”
The bottom line on enablement, according to Check Point’s Criado, is that it’s crucial for security vendors to invest in providing partners with a personal touch at key moments of a partnership.
Check Point, for instance, has invested to ensure that every new partner who is on-boarded gets a one-on-one meeting with someone from the company.
That’s “no easy feat,” Criado said, given that the company recruited 2,000 new partners last year. But it’s crucial for setting the new partners on the right path and helping them to plan out where they want to go in the partnership, he said.
“I’m just a huge proponent of education and enablement,” Criado said, because that’s what drives knowledge, among other things. And ultimately, “it’s knowledge that really drives this business growth.”