FireEye to gain feet on the ground in NZ

FireEye is setting up a sales and pre-sales engineering team in New Zealand 'as quickly as we possibly can' on the back of strong Australian growth and an increasing move by partners to offer the vendor's solution as a service, rather than simple resale.

Chris Barton, FireEye manager strategic alliances/channels says now is the time to continue investing in New Zealand in preparation for growth locally.

“Our intent is to put on a business development manager or territory manager, who will be supported by a sales engineer, in the very near future, and potentially look to expand that team towards the end of this calendar year, early next year,” Barton says.

“If you look at what has happened in the Australian market over the last 12 months, that would be in line with the sort of growth we've seen over there.”

The new hires would be the first staff on the ground in New Zealand for FireEye, which has been previously used Australia-based staff for local support.

Barton is also recruiting a channel account manager to work alongside him in supporting ANZ channel partners.

“As we continue to grow our partner community we need more feet on the street to support it," he adds.

“We're looking to build on the successes we've had already in New Zealand, to continue to build out our relationships and enablement with our partner community and ultimately be successful in working with a number of new customers.”

Barton says the company has a 'very big service provider focus' which will only strenghten this year as the service providers evolve and build out capabilities around the advanced persistant threat space.

“The nature of security challenges is evolving and they're having to keep up with their client's demand," he adds.

“This year that focus [on service providers] will ramp up, through the service providers recognising the opportunity they see to work with FireEye particularly in places like New Zealand.”

Barton says local service providers' customers range from government to large enterprise to SMB.

“They really have the capability to touch a lot of different parts of the market through different product offerings," he says.

"We recognise that different parts of those offerings we can do different things with to get to market.”

Barton says the company's partner programme acknowledges the different types of partners – MSSP, service providers, consulting partners, distribution and technology alliance partners – it has and the need to engage differently with different partners.

“Service providers and consulting partners are less interested in reselling products. They're interested in selling services. What we can do is come up with some pretty unique ways of letting them use FireEye as a tool to provide threat assessment and security services to their customers in a non resale way,” he says.

“I've seen very few vendors come up with a formula that works for those types of partners in that way," he adds.

He says many partners are adopting and using FireEye's technology as a tool, rather than just a resale opportunity.

“It tends to follow a cycle where they use FireEye technology to help their customer understand they might have a problem, which turns into a sale, which turns into a managed service offering, which turns into more services for that organisation over time as they provide remediation and incident response type services to that customer as well.”