We kicked off a series of conferences with our partners this week in Las Vegas, the start of our Partner Connections that continue throughout the month. So far, we’ve been getting a lot of really positive feedback.
Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman spoke about our winning strategy for the security market, how we’re different from the big guys, and how we’re supporting our channel to make success simple.
Meanwhile, as we were getting things going, others were calling it quits. Target’s embattled CEO resigned, and an executive for a major security company pronounced “AV is dead.”
Success made simple for partners
Winning and Las Vegas don’t always go hand in hand, but it sure felt like it this week at our Partner Connections kick-off in the land of luck.
We’re excited that over 1,000 of our partners will attend this year’s conferences, and we’re looking forward to meeting with many more of you in London and Hanoi later this month to talk about our strategic vision for success made simple. (We’re also bringing our ground-breaking World of Warbiking tour along for the ride).
Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman says we are disrupting the market with our comprehensive security offerings, from endpoint through mobile, cloud and the network.
“We see [the] opportunity to combine endpoint and the network to be a real winning one,” Kris said in an interview reported by CRN.
Michael Miller, owner and vice president of operations at Assorted Business Services, said our channel-first strategy is showing results.
“There’s really been a turnaround in a big way,” Miller said. “I think they brought in people who know how to build out and better utilize the channel for growth.”
Target CEO falls on his sword
Gregg Steinhafel, erstwhile CEO of the beleaguered Target chain of retail stores, resigned this week after months of pressure over the epic data breach that put millions of consumers at risk of credit card fraud.
The announcement comes shortly after Target’s CIO resigned, and Target’s pledge to make the switch to the more-secure chip and PIN credit cards that use one-time transaction codes rather than the credit card number.
Target’s woes are well-known at this point, but the company is definitely shaking things up now for the better. Let’s hope other companies are paying close attention.
“Executives at organizations the world over should be reading into what happened at Target very carefully,” Chester Wisniewski, Sophos senior security advisor, wrote in a Naked Security post this week.
Symantec puts foot in mouth
Symantec, the stumbling giant of the security industry, courted controversy this week after one of its top executives told the Wall Street Journal that antivirus is “dead.”
“We don’t think of antivirus as a moneymaker in any way,” Brian Dye, Symantec’s senior vice president for information security, told the WSJ.
It’s the kind of statement that, once you’ve said it, it’s hard to take back.
Never mind that, Symantec seemed to say in an interview with Marketplace, what we really meant was that the era of antivirus only is dead.
We’ve been saying that for a long time, which is why Sophos offers complete security, including endpoint antivirus, encryption for data protection, as well as network protection against advanced persistent threats.
It’s been working out pretty well for us.
“It’s certainly the busiest time of my career and I’ve been doing this for close to 20 years,” Chester Wisniewski, senior security advisor at Sophos, tells Marketplace.
Sophos Security Chet Chat #146: Target, Microsoft, Dropbox and the mysterious “Webdriver Torso”
Listen to our security experts Chester Wisniewski and Paul Ducklin discuss all the big security stories of the week in this episode of the Chet Chat podcast. It’s an informative and entertaining quarter-hour of news, opinion and advice.
60-Second Security: Is Apple finally getting real about security?
Paul Ducklin reviews the news of the week in just about a minute.
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