WatchGuard APAC partners celebrate partnership and wins

Manux Solutions Limited wins APAC MSP of Year, with five other partners from the region winning different categories.

For WatchGuard Technologies, partners are basically the only way the cybersecurity vendor goes to market. It does not deal directly with customers, nor does the company have plans to look into that in the future.

This is why its solutions are designed specifically for MSPs to offer their customers of all sizes globally. While SMBs remain in the core market focus for MSPs, some enterprises are also now looking to use MSPs, given the amount of security needed, especially in the AI era.

In Asia Pacific, over 100 partners gathered at the WatchGuard Impact partner summit in Bali; to listen to Joe Smorlanski, CEO of WatchGuard share his plans and vision for the company. But more importantly, the partners attending that they could relate more to Smorlanski, who happened to be from an MSP as well, before taking over his new role.

The 3-day summit also witnessed the preview of RAI, WatchGuard’s new agentic tool for MSPs. RAI is now available for partners in the region, with partners seemingly excited with the simplification it provides to them in managing their operations.

The highlight of the partner summit was the partner awards where six partners from the region were awarded for their success and growth in the region. The winners include:

According to Darren Siah from LinxAxia Networks, while the Malaysian market is smaller compared to other countries, in 2025, the MSP was able to reach out to the market and increase its market share in the country.

“I have to extend my thanks to my team as well. So, we put in quite a lot of effort into cross-traveling, to end point security, up point, and such. I believe with this sort of momentum, we should be able to sell more of other solutions under WatchGuard. We do have presence in other countries, especially Southeast Asia region and our ultimate objective of LinkAsia is to reach out to the whole region,” he said.

For Stuyvesant Lim from Fronter Force Technology, the recognition is important as it proves that we are the one of the top players in this part of the world. He hopes WatchGuard will continue to see them as strong partners and continue to work with them.

“They are very supportive on the solutions that we are doing. And we are very creative as partners right now in the service market. Our customers recognize the WatchGuard as an international brand in a security and that brand will help us to enhance our relationship with our trust with the solution,” Lim said.

Meanwhile, Peter Kirsopp from Manux Solutions, as a WatchGuard partner for over 14 years, the win is good for the team that worked really hard as a collective for clients.

“WatchGuard is a vendor that actually listens and engages with us so we can actually give feedback and see that feedback gets turned into change and gets the benefit of it. And that's incredibly important for us to have really focused relationships and with those strong relationships, we win together,” he said.

Kirsopp is also looking forward to the next release of WatchGuard CloudDR which he believes is a game changer for the MSP to really understand where the risks are.

“It’s going to really help us to stay up to speed with the tools and help us know where the problems are and remediate quickly,’ he added.

At the same time, Kirsopp also shared that the MSP market in Australia and New Zealand is a tough market because there's so many new resellers who are trying to have a different view.

“We just try to stay on the line. We're an IT solution provider and we've got very good customers that are incredibly loyal. And we want to focus on customer service, and that's really important for long-term retention. So, we're not trying to be too aggressive in the market. We will focus on what we know what we have, and we pick up customers along the way, which is great,” he concluded.