Trend Micro Redesigns Partner Program With New Competencies, Discounts

The cybersecurity vendor is also expanding its portfolio of assessment tools as part of a push to help enable partners to deliver more services.

Trend Micro took another major step in its efforts to help enable the channel to deliver more services around its Vision One cybersecurity platform with the launch Wednesday of a redesigned partner program that adds new competencies, assessments and discounts for partners.

The availability of competencies from Trend Micro — including in areas such as professional and managed services — is a great move that will help partners to showcase their service capabilities to customers, said MJ DiBerardino, co-founder and CEO at Cloudnexa, a longtime Trend Micro partner based in Newtown Square, Pa.

[Related: Trend Micro Debuts MSP-Focused Version Of Vision One Platform]

Cloudnexa — a provider of professional and managed services that focuses heavily on security and compliance — also works closely with AWS and has seen a lot of benefit from the launch of partner competencies by the cloud giant, DiBerardino told CRN.

“When you go in to a customer, you have this proven track record without having to do a lot of due diligence — because AWS has done that diligence on you,” he said. Now, Trend Micro is “releasing a very similar program with their competencies,” DiBerardino said.

In addition to competencies for professional services and managed security services, Trend Micro is now offering competencies for cloud security, Security Operations Center (SOC) and incident response.

Earning the Trend Micro competencies will provide crucial validation that should ultimately enable quicker-to-close deals with customers, DiBerardino said.

“Now the customer isn’t burdened with going and talking to three of your past customers,” he said. “That diligence was already done by the software provider — in this case Trend [Micro]. So it’s going to help expedite the sales process.”

Louise McEvoy, vice president of U.S. channels at Trend Micro, told CRN that earning competencies will also qualify partners to receive additional discounts — which are now being introduced with the channel program update.

“We’re adding in more discounts. So if [partners] have a competency, if they have more people within the company that are certified, if they have new deal registrations … we’re going to recognize them and add it to their stack [of] discounts,” McEvoy said.

Other new discounts now being added are connected to partners bringing in brand-new customers to Trend Micro or transacting through marketplaces, she said.

“The more they invest, the higher their discount is with Trend,” McEvoy said.

Meanwhile, Trend Micro is also debuting new assessment tools that can help partners to deliver additional services in new areas, the company announced.

In addition to the previously available Cyber Risk Assessments offering, Trend Micro is also adding assessments for external attack surface, cloud posture and Azure Active Directory.

At Cloudnexa, DiBerardino said the introduction of new assessments is another indicator that Trend Micro is committed to bringing a “partner-friendly” approach.

“They’re very proactive in helping the partner grow their business,” he said. “That’s really important for service providers like us. We have to make our way through hundreds if not thousands of ISVs, and figure out where our dollars are best being spent. I’ve been partnered with them for over eight years now. I’m obviously getting the ROI on that investment.”

The redesigned partner program follows Trend Micro’s debut of a service-focused version of Vision One in August, along with a new MSP partner category.

The updates also come as Trend Micro continues to expand the capabilities on Vision One, its unified cybersecurity platform for threat detection, response and prevention. In June, for instance, the vendor unveiled a generative AI-powered assistant — the Trend Vision One Companion — that can help security analysts to improve their productivity and effectiveness, particularly around threat hunting, according to the company.