Co-hosting with ChannelE2E’s Content Czar Joe Panettieri, CompTIA President and CEO Todd Thibodeaux chatted with Bill Conner, SonicWall CEO, on the security company’s journey under new ownership, a pure channel partner strategy and accelerated R&D.
It’s been about a year since SonicWall became an independent company of Dell. What are some of the key benefits of private equity ownership?
It’s really been a great year. One, we now have the ability to do radical changes fast without a lot of hurdles for people to run through to get things done. Coming out of Dell, we had a lot of changes to make across the business frontier; from going to 100 percent channel, to our service, to our product, to returning to our own brand. The second thing is access to capital. I’ve got a pool of capital with deep pockets that understands the space and if I need to acquire and tuck in, or acquire and be strategic, I’ve got that access and depth and breadth at the table for me to do that. The last thing, is when you have alignment with the board, the company, the management and the financial incentives, it’s a wonderful thing. That’s what a good private equity firm with good management and leadership affords you the luxury to do. We can focus on our business and do the right thing for our customers and our partners.
Talk about the fact that you went 100 percent channel. Was the partner community receptive of that or did they take a wait and see approach?
That was the two billion-dollar question when we did our due-diligence. We thought, how would the partners react to SonicWall coming back again? Had we destroyed the brand? Had we hurt the partners? Had we lost product innovation at the core? We launched SecureFirst, which is our partner program, November 1 last year, and it took off faster than we or our owners thought would happen. We’re at 19,000 partners one year later and 7,000 of those are new partners. It’s way beyond anything we’ve seen in the market and certainly way beyond our expectations.
We’ve talked a lot about the changing landscape of the partner make up out there. Are you surprised by the new types of partners you have as part of this new emergence?
Yes, I think we’ve done an incredible job of trying to rebuild the ecosystem for the new threats that are coming. The new partners are already technology-enabled with the resources and capability. We also opened up our traditional channels that may not have those skills, and frankly don’t want to go build those skills. Now, they have access to those new kinds of partners.
You guys were very humble when you spun off from Dell in terms of admitting to having to accelerate your R&D. It seems like you re-thought how you wanted to roll out R&D going forward.
That’s 100 percent correct. SonicWall was not at the pace it originally had been when it was private and public before. But, it’s not just about the pace, it’s about where the threats are going to and how the networks themselves are changing. SonicWall has always been a network-security-play type company. So, we started focusing on everything from IoT to mobile threats, the extension of the networks, the branch networks, the campus networks, cloud, and looked at where we needed to get through over a two- to three-year horizon. And, then we laid out the pieces that you see us releasing in September and October this past year. Over the next six months you’re going to see the other planks of this longer-term strategy playing out.
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