Sophos Partners Face Transition To Cyberoam Appliance

Sophos is phasing out its unified threat management appliances for a new line that supports the company's plan to tightly integrate its cloud, endpoint and network security products into a threat detection and response platform for midsize businesses.

Sophos engineers are working on a significant overhaul of its product line to integrate its recent acquisition of UTM maker Cyberoam Technologies. Partners in Sophos’ managed service providers program could be impacted the most by the changes.

The transition, expected to take 18 months, may be a steep one, partners tell CRN, but Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman said he believes the changes are sure to intensify his company’s battle against competitors for a larger share of small and midsize business customers. Cyberoam helped Sophos expand its engineering team from 100 to 350 to deliver on product roadmaps, Hagerman said.

[Related: Sophos CEO To Partners: We're Poised To Disrupt The Network Security Market ]

"We had these broad ambitions to become a significant player in network security and we had a really high quality team with Astaro, but it was about a hundred engineers and we couldn't get to all of the opportunities that we wanted to deliver on," Hagerman said.

Cyberoam, which was acquired in February, was chosen to be the foundation of the new UTM because of its centralized management, its reporting capabilities and versatility, said Jason Clark, director of sales engineering at Sophos. It is capable of supporting large scale management and policy integration associated with complex environments and can be integrated with third-party IT management system software popular with MSPs, he said.

’This is not a new product that we’re starting from scratch; it’s been in a lot of MSP environments and has been very successful,’ Clark said. ’It was built from the ground up as a solid MSP platform.’

Sophos recently refreshed its UTM appliances for network, Web and email protection, introducing support for the latest Intel processors. The appliance range begins with SG210 for the midmarket.

Sophos is taking a smattering of features from its current Astaro line of appliances and integrating its recent acquisition of UTM maker Cyberoam Technologies. The new appliance will be more deeply rooted in Cyberoam’s code base.

Overall the UTM market grew from 1.3 billion to 1.5 billion from 2012 to 2013 at a growth rate of about 16 percent, according to Gartner. Most growth was in China, Latin America and Asia Pacific. Fortinet is the global market leader with a 24 percent share followed by Check Point Technologies, Dell Sonicwall and Cisco Systems. New China-based contender, Huawai, is an emerging contender and quickly gaining ground.

Security vendors are increasingly merging endpoint and network functions, said Lawrence Pingree, a research director at Gartner Inc. Palo Alto Networks acquired Cyvera and FireEye acquired Mandiant, which has endpoint security components. In the midmarket, Sophos acquired Astaro and McAfee was one of first endpoint protection vendors to enter the UTM space heavily and maintain a focus on it, Petigree said.

"The blending occurring between the network and the endpoint requires the sales force to engage with multiple buyers," Pingree said. "An organization's endpoint person may not be the same as the networking person."