From visibility to growth: How Kaspersky’s Partnerverse is reshaping APAC channel engagement

Ernest Chai, Head of Channel for APAC at Kaspersky discusses more about the impact and opportunities of Partnerverse to the APAC partner ecosystem.

Kaspersky recently launched Partnerverse, an interactive portal designed to showcase the cybersecurity vendor’s global partner network across diverse regions and categories as well as highlight the vital role of partners in building a secure digital future.

With an extensive network of over 18,000 partners globally, Parnerverse will highlight the immense value of its partner community, symbolizing the IT channel's evolution into a synergistic ecosystem centered on expertise and co-innovation. Specifically, the Partnerverse platform visualizes the vendor's global network, acknowledging the crucial contributions of its partners while showcasing the immense scale and opportunities for future allies.

In the Asia Pacific region, Kaspersky is hoping Partnerverse will be benefiting for partners as they look to enablement as well as enhance their capabilities with the vendor.

In an email interview with CRN Asia, Ernest Chai, Head of Channel for APAC at Kaspersky discusses more about the impact of Partnerverse to the APAC partner ecosystem as well as the feedback from partners plus the potential opportunities in the region.

Do note that the comments have been edited for clarity.

How important is Partnerverse to the APAC partner ecosystem? Will it change how partners do business in the region?

APAC remains a highly channel-driven market, with partners playing a critical role in delivering cybersecurity solutions and services to customers. In this context, Partnerverse serves as a significant enabler of this regional partner ecosystem as it provides greater visibility into Kaspersky’s network - helping partners showcase their expertise and specialisations while making it easier for customers and prospective partners to identify the right collaborators.

Rather than fundamentally changing how partners do business in the region, Partnerverse is designed to strengthen both their ability to connect with prospects and to differentiate themselves within the broader ecosystem. By bringing together success stories, competencies and regional presence in a single digital environment, it can work to foster greater collaboration and co-innovation to help partners deliver stronger cybersecurity offerings while driving business growth.

What has been the initial feedback from partners been about Partnerverse?

Initial feedback on the Kaspersky Partnerverse initiative has been extremely positive, specifically regarding how it modernised channel engagement and provided visibility across Kaspersky's different partnership models. The feedback we have received generally cantered around three key areas. They include:

Gamified Visibility & Recognition: Partners are positive about the interactive visual mapping (the 'Planets' and 'Orbits'). Tiering - from Silver to Platinum - is visually clear. High-performing partners have specifically mentioned that being showcased in the 'Hall of Orbits' and 'Hero Cases' gives them great co-branding material to show their end-clients.

Alignment Across Partner Tracks: Channel partners appreciated that Partnerverse accounts for the distinct ways they do business. Whether a partner falls under Sell (VARs), Manage (MSPs), Deploy, or Build, the platform reflects their specific contributions rather than using a 'one-size-fits-all' sales metric.

Streamlined Partner Journey: Partners noted that integrating the visual experience directly with the Kaspersky United Partner Portal made onboarding and navigating training, certifications, and incentive tracks significantly smoother.

What else are partners in the region hoping to get more from Kaspersky? What are the trends you are seeing in customers in the region and how are you ensuring partners are capable of solving customer pain points?

Regional partners are looking for deeper enablement, flexible business models, and actionable support to help them transition into outcome-driven security advisors. Across the region, enterprise customers are squeezed by a severe cybersecurity skills gap, hyper-deceptive threat vectors, and expanding operational complexity across both IT and OT environments. Protecting modern infrastructure - spanning hybrid-cloud networks down to critical industrial control systems, has become too resource-intensive and cost-prohibitive for internal teams, driving a massive regional shift toward external expertise and outsourced managed security services.

To ensure partners can address these pain points, Kaspersky continues to heavily invest in its MSSP partner program while leveraging its expansive portfolio spanning IT and OT security. By providing channel partners with flexible consumption models, specialised training, and unified protection - from endpoint and cloud security to industrial cybersecurity solutions like Kaspersky Industrial CyberSecurity (KICS) - partners can deliver holistic managed services without building proprietary tech from scratch. This enables partners to act as trusted, single-source security extensions for their clients' entire operational footprint.

The Kaspersky Partnerverse framework further accelerates this strategy by creating total transparency across the regional ecosystem. By mapping out specific partner capabilities across dedicated Sell, Manage, Deploy, and Build tracks, Partnerverse makes it simple for enterprise and industrial customers to identify qualified partners with the precise technical expertise required for their environment. Ultimately, this approach equips partners to protect every layer of a client's digital and physical operations while remaining easily discoverable in a competitive marketplace.

Can you tell us a bit more about the midmarket opportunity and how are you addressing this with partners?

The APAC midmarket presents a massive opportunity for cybersecurity growth. Rapid digital transformation across diverse economies is driving mid-sized businesses to seek advanced defence frameworks to counter sophisticated, AI-driven threats. This is especially true for manufacturing and supply chain sectors where IT and operational technology (OT) are converging. However, these organisations face a severe cyber-talent shortage, making them highly receptive to scalable security ecosystems that deliver automated protection without overwhelming their limited internal IT resources.

To capture this market, Kaspersky relies on a partner-first strategy anchored by its "Kaspersky Next" portfolio and localised Managed Service Provider (MSP/MSSP) models. Through the Kaspersky United Partner Program, we equip resellers and system integrators to deploy EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) and XDR (Extended Detection and Response) solutions tailored to each market's digital maturity. By offering multi-tenant cloud architectures for MSPs to bundle white-labeled security services, Kaspersky empowers its channel network to seamlessly manage threat detection and resolve the midmarket talent gap.

Are you seeing an increased demand for MSSP services, especially from the midmarket organizations?

Yes, we are seeing growing demand for MSSP services across the board, driven largely by the widening cybersecurity skills gap and the complexity of today's threat landscape that increasingly presents MSSP services as a more cost-efficient and effective method of maintaining robust cybersecurity defences.

This demand is particularly pronounced among midmarket organisations, as they in fact face many of the same cyber risks as large enterprises, but operate with far more constrained resources. Additionally, the need to manage increasingly complex IT environments given greater cloud infrastructure integration adds to the cost and operational weight of building and maintaining these functions in-house. In this backdrop, MSSP services then naturally emerge as an attractive option for midmarket organisations to maintain their cyber resiliency while freeing up additional resources to focus on other business priorities.

Lastly, what is your advice to your partners in the region, especially with the launch of Partnerverse?

The cyberthreat landscape is becoming more sophisticated at an unprecedented pace - a reality that has been brought into sharp focus in recent years as generative AI emerges as a particularly potent tool that enables threat actors to create highly convincing and tailored campaigns at scale. In fact, Kaspersky detected and blocked 75 million attacks originating from online resources across APAC in the first half of 2026, and the average number of mobile threat detections per affected user across APAC markets also surged 49% year-on-year in Q1 2026, rising from 4.9 to 7.3.

As such, it is clear that cybersecurity can no longer be approached in isolation. This is precisely why we launched Partnerverse. We want to encourage both existing and prospective partners to view it as more than a directory, but as a springboard that gives partners greater visibility to unlock new avenues for collaboration – from the co-development of innovative, locally relevant solutions, to the sharing of expertise within the Kaspersky network. Ultimately, we hope our partners will leverage Partnerverse as another tool to deepen relationships and better address evolving customer needs, for this will be the key to helping partners differentiate themselves and capture the growing demand for cybersecurity services.