Malwarebytes announces a new partnership with Bask Technology, which both highlights their endpoint protection product, and is part of the company’s plan to significantly expand their presence in the SMB space going forward.
Malwarebytes for Business
Malwarebytes is best known – and by many, only known – for its free malware remediation solution for consumers. However, the company also has cybersecurity solutions for endpoint protection as well as remediation, which includes a commercial product, Malwarebytes for Business, with over 60,000 customers. The company is looking to expand that significantly however, and is looking to expand its relationships with managed service providers as a part of that strategy. That explains their presence at last month’s ConnectWise Connect event in Orlando. It also underpins some new partnerships, including a newly announced one with Bask Technology, a division of Nanoheal, which provides primarily consumer tech support, although they do have some small business customers.
“This kind of partnership is a key part of our strategy,” said Cris Martinez, Senior Director, RMM and Strategic Partnerships at Malwarebytes. “Our focus in the next year is on the MSP side, and the Bask partnership is in line with this, and with our overall global strategy. Bask has a very large customer base, which allows us to refine what we do from our toolset perspective.”
Martinez said that these kinds of partners are important to spread the message to the market that Malwarebytes is about much more than damage remediation for consumers.
“What we are trying to do is to get SMBs to deploy us into their environment, and we would like to be able to be bundles by any of those types of partners,” he indicated. Malwarebytes has been known for remediation only, but we are now very strong on proactive protection. We want the MSP to go to customers and say that we protect the endpoint, that Malwarebutes not only allows them to clean up afterwards, but also provides a preventative option.
Cris Martinez, Senior Director, RMM and Strategic Partnerships at Malwarebytes
“We already have several hundred MSPs, and we have partnerships with RMM [remote monitoring and management] providers Kaseya and ConnectWise, but we have decided that we want to enhance this further,” Martinez added.
Bask provides outsourced IT support, mainly to the consumer market and mainly in the U.S.
“We have been around for fifteen years,” said Clancey Dollard, director of service delivery at Bask. “Three years ago, we went through a branding change from iTOK [IT is OK] in part because it was a dot.net. We wanted a dot.com, so we landed on Bask, with the meaning being that we will alleviate the stress of IT with outsourced IT support and you bask in the rest. We have found that our target market is late adopters to tech – individuals who are intelligent, but for whom tech is a struggle for them. We have bundled software-as-a-service and offer it as a part of memberships.”
The vast majority of their business is consumer. Dollard estimated it at 95 per cent.
“There are several hundred small businesses, but that part of the market is growing,” he said.
They have a presence in Canada, but it is a small one, less than 5 per cent.
“It’s a pay-per-click business, and the vast majority of them are US-based,” Dollard said. “Our other challenge in Canada is that identity protection is part of our memberships, and that is something that we can’t do outside the U.S.”
Bask had previously been a long-time partner of Trend Micro to provide the anti-virus protection in their bundle, and while they used Malwarebytes internally, it was employees using the freeware malware recovery product that is most commonly associated with the company.
“We had always leveraged Malwarebytes even prior to using their endpoint protection product, by using that freeware software,” Dollard said. “That is how we associated them. We didn’t associate them with endpoint protection until very recently, and got interested when we found out. There were some pain points with the previous provider, particularly installations that took over 30 minutes, which is a long time for customers.”
Martinez indicated that the Bask partnership strengthens Malwarebytes in multiple ways.
“The focus on our endpoint protection products allows MSPs to see that we are a business product, and shows that we aren’t just a consumer company,” he said. “Depending how they want to go to market, we should have an option for them. The Bask partnership also shows smaller MSPs offerings that they can add to their portfolio. It allows them to broaden what their offerings can be.”
