'Our direct-touch approach is disrupting the market' - SonicWall's new Ireland boss on becoming more than just a firewall vendor

SonicWall has appointed a new Ireland country manager, who will look to take on its closest rivals Fortinet and Sophos in the Irish market.

Tristan Bateup (pictured) told CPI that key to his strategy is convincing the market that the California-HQ company is "not just a firewall vendor any more".

Bateup has been in his role since 1 February, the start of SonicWall's financial year.

Since then, he claims he has set about getting the message across to partners about SonicWall's wider portfolio.

Bateup said SonicWall's channel team in Ireland has been restructured to bring more roles into the country.

"Where we've invested is in a better structure for Ireland. We've now got people in place in country from a sales and marketing, sales and engineering and obviously a country lead perspective," he said.

He said the vendor has also started drumming up business itself in "a direct-touch approach", with opportunities then being passed back to partners.

"We're 100 per cent channel," he said. "But as our portfolio grows, we need to be telling that story ourselves.

"We've been a lot more forthright with getting in touch with end users and prospecting, getting them on a call and doing webinars to present to them that we're covering so many more angles now.

"With our cloud application security technology, we're able to secure their endpoint with our capture client, we've got our Capture Security Center, which then gives them a single pane of glass to manage all that."

Bateup estimated that around 80 to 85 per cent of the vendor's current revenues in Ireland are still generated from selling firewalls.

"However, we're having probably deeper conversations and we're getting more entrenched into a customer's network than we have ever done before because we can now cover so many points."

He added: "It's making us harder to displace."

Those he is looking to displace in the Irish cybersecurity market are top rivals Fortinet, Sophos, Juniper and Check Point.

He claims that the feedback he has had from partners on his direct-touch strategy is that it is "disruptive" in the market, and is helping partners upsell more SonicWall solutions.

"In some instances, we've actually had partners come to us and say, we'd like you to go and talk to this customer of ours, because at the moment, we don't we don't cover their security. But we'd like you to go and have a conversation with them around your portfolio.

"We help those conversations grow out."

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• Tristan Bateup
• Ireland
• SonicWall