Darktrace focused on partner ecosystem and growth in Asia

“We already have some fantastic customers in the region, across North Asia and South Asia. What we want to do is to strengthen our partnerships,” says Sumit Bansal, Darktrace’s Asia VP of Sales.

Darktrace’s relies heavily on its partner ecosystem in Asia as the cybersecurity vendor continues to look to enable customers with better cybersecurity options. However, one of the biggest challenges organizations in Asia are facing today is dealing with the increasing number of cybersecurity solutions they have invested in over the years.

With vendor consolidation and moving to a platformized cybersecurity approach on the top of the agenda for most businesses in the region, Darktrace believes its channel partners are doing everything they can to ensure customers get the best options available to them.

According to Sumit Bansal, Darktrace’s Asia VP, when partners work with customers, they are now just enabling cybersecurity. Instead, he believes that partners are working across a lot of different areas for customers.

“They're looking at infrastructure, they're looking at how do they work in the cloud, what applications are they using? What are the SaaS applications they're going to work with? How do they then put edge security across all of those and accessing those applications. Having the knowledge of the customer is important so that we can then understand what challenges they're facing, where the gaps are and how we can help them with that,” said Bansal.

Bansal also stated that having a conversation with a customer along with a partner is much more effective for Darktrace rather than going on their own because the cybersecurity vendor is very much focused on what they have as a platform.

“We may end up talking about what we can do, whereas when we have that contextual information from the partner about the customer and what they already have in their environment and the challenges they're facing, that gives us a much deeper knowledge and then we can do a much better job at understanding. So sometimes we can go in very narrow and say, let's look at solving your network issues, your network security issues, but they may be having issues with email, they may be having challenges with visibility in the cloud, they may be in multi-cloud systems and they don't have an idea of how secure they are or how vulnerable they are,” added Bansal.

Hence, partners become so important for Darktrace and that's something that they are building in the region.

“I would say that out of all the regions, Asia is probably the most partner-centric and partner-friendly to Darktrace. So, we're very proud of that and I think we are going in the right direction,” he added.

Dealing with vendor consolidation

When it comes to vendor consolidation, Basal explained that Darktrace looks at it from a customer perspective.

“We do a lot of work helping younger companies come through as well, not necessarily going all the way through to acquisition, making sure that the industry is kind of being fueled from the bottom up. From a customer perspective, consolidating onto a more standardized platform is really helpful. I think a lot of our customers come to us because of the partnership with Microsoft, because of the partnership with AWS, and that really sets the tone of how they're thinking about consolidating themselves. So, whatever we can do to build, buy, and partner underneath that is good for the customer,” said Bansal.

Bansal also pointed out that a typical customer has between 60 or 70 applications that they're running in their organization.

“And when Microsoft comes in and says, I want to offer E5 to you; they can consolidate it down to 25. And that saves them a lot of money when it comes to consolidation and integration. And that's why we work so closely with Microsoft in that area. It's a good thing for the customer because, in a way, we can take more telemetry data out of Microsoft, we can provide a much deeper visibility of what's going on in their organization environment, and customers get more value out of it. So, it's, to me, that's a no-brainer. And the market is going towards that, and there's no point in fighting against it,” he explained.

Growth in APAC

Given its presence in the region, Basal also believes that the future for Darktrace in Asia is going to be focused on AI, securing AI and resilience.

“Those are the three big topics that kind of keep coming up in my conversations. As an Asia business, for us, it's about building a brand of Darktrace in Asia. We already have some fantastic customers in the region, across North Asia and South Asia. What we want to do is strengthen our partnerships. We have built some very strong partnerships. For example, in Singapore, we're working very closely with NCS, we're working with ST Engineering, Ensign Infosecurity and more. These are very strong partners for us in this region,” said Bansal.

“And we're building these partnerships and relationships and focusing on customers that are probably mostly in the critical infrastructure pocket,” he concluded.