BlackBerry, Cylance Partner Programs Unify In ‘A Really Huge Win For The Customer’

‘The go-to-market strategy is going to simplify everything ... I think that‘s a huge win. It’s a win for the manufacturer. It’s a huge win for the partner. But most importantly, it’s a really huge win for the customer,’ says Michael E. Crean, a BlackBerry partner, who is the president and CEO of the MSSP Solutions Granted Inc.

Two years after Blackberry acquired endpoint security vendor Cylance for $1.8 billion, the combined company has unveiled a new partner program that is focused on building growth and helping partners protect sales through a new deal registration site.

“The go-to-market strategy is going to simplify everything,” said Michael E. Crean, a BlackBerry partner who is the president and CEO of the MSSP Solutions Granted Inc. “When you can make the selling cycle simple, and you can make it more effective, and you can give partners more stuff to sell that really works. I think that‘s a huge win. It’s a win for the manufacturer. It’s a huge win for the partner. But most importantly, it’s a really huge win for the customer.”

May Mitchell, vice president, global channel sales, alliances and field marketing for Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry, said the new program blends the best of what both companies offer into one success-focused platform.

“We are unifying the entire partner program,” Mitchell told CRN. “It’s really to simplify things for them. Speed to market. It’s a program based on our foundational principals that we’ve been following, and that is to help our partners build new business growth. It’s partner protection. It provides innovation as well as continuous enablement.”

Deal registration, training, sales enablement, co-branded marketing material are all available under the new partner program, but May said the “Uber” message to partners is that Blackberry is giving them access to its entire portfolio of solutions.

“So it means that they can now get rewards for providing solutions that protect their customers businesses, their endpoints and their people,” she said.

It includes the AI-driven BlackBerry cyber-solutions, as well as Spark solutions which protect collaboration tools, work-from-anywhere solutions, as well as the critical events solution called BlackBerry AtHoc Crisis Communications System.

“The entire portfolio will be available for more than 2,200 solution providers resellers,” she said. “We have over 400 MSSP partners. That’s our fastest growing partner segment. Then we have over 150 ISV partners, global alliances, and OEMs, then we have 40 global distributors.”

Also blended into the new program is the three partner tiers ranked emerald, gold, and silver, which have existed under Cylance, but are new to BlackBerry partners.

Central to partners, however, is a deal registration site that will allow them to protect the hard-won customers they have worked to crack. Crean said this is critical for partners who everyday are facing threats from bigger and bigger competition.

“A lot of times you have, for lack of a better term, ambulance chasers. People out there sniffing on deals,” Crean said. “All of a sudden, they’ll just try to sneak in under the radar and jam it in. Making sure that that deal protection is there is going to make the partner community within BlackBerry Cylance better … I think what’s got me really excited about this is that BlackBerry is learning a lot about the channel side of operations and it is great to see this coming together holistically across all of their business lines.”