SentryBay already has a good presence in North America, but it is almost all in the U.S. and mainly among very large enterprises like banks, so they have signed their first North American disti deal to expand somewhat downmarket, and in Canada.
Brent Agar, VP Business Development in North America at SentryBay
British-headquartered cybersecurity software firm SentryBay has signed its first North American distribution deal, with TD SYNNEX. While the company already has a strong presence in the U.S. – it is their largest market – they are looking to the distributor to expand that, as well as to expand their presence in Canada.
“We started out more focused on the B2B2C market,” said Brent Agar, VP Business Development in North America at SentryBay. “A lot of business developed around the identity theft market, where companies included our technology. We took a different approach to security which recognized that the success rate of AV protection picking up new threats has gone down over the years. With Armored Client, we do not have to identity the risk. We look at things like suspected keylogging and give them nonsensical long, long passwords. It’s a different way of looking at the problem.”
The focus increasingly in the last 4-5 years has been on remote endpoint management.
“That had become our biggest strength, even before COVID, providing endpoint security for vendors and employees working remotely,” Agar said. “It led to a major increase in our customer base, and now it is growing further, as companies are going to hybrid workforces.”
The Armored Client application creates a confined environment within which any application can run, including VDI clients, thin clients, DaaS, VPN clients, browsers and enterprise/SaaS applications.
“Gartner says there isn’t a true competitor for Armored Client,” Agar said. “We are in a slightly niche market – protecting user endpoints when they work remotely. The first area we looked at is VDI, but you have to type something in which keyloggers can steal, so cloud security even with VDI isn’t fully secure. Our initial success was around VDI products protecting those endpoints. We define protection by device as well as by user name and password, which is very important for compliance.”
The SentryBay Data Protection Suite protects information from keyloggers and spyware when data is entered or viewed via the browser.
“We also have a version – BankSafe – for consumer protection from banks – which is deployed through banks,” Agar added.
While SentryBay now has a significant presence in the U.S. market, they are looking to TD SYNNEX to increase that significantly, and get a broader range of customers to add SentryBay to their security stack.
“We have had a presence in North America for 10 years out of Charlotte,” Agar stated. “The U.S. is now our number one market. A lot of that though has been driven by larger clients in North America, and a lot of our deals have been huge ones. We have always been very strong in banking. We believe that TD SYNNEX can get us into the middle market.”
They also believe that TD SYNNEX can help strengthen SentryBay in the Canadian market, where they are present, but not strong.
“The only work we have done in Canada is more around B2B2C,” Agar said – this agreement includes Canada too, so we are keen to engage with Canadian companies to resell our technology. It’s a green pasture in some respects.”
Lynda Edwards, Channel Sales Manager at SentryBay
Lynda Edwards, Channel Sales Manager at SentryBay, joined the company last November after a long career predominantly in distribution, mainly at Azlan, a European disti which was owned by Tech Data.
“Distribution gives you scale and specialists, and TD SYNNEX is very strong in both of them,” she said. “While this is a North American deal, they are very strong globally, especially in APAC, and we are in discussions for other markets.”
This is SentryBay’s first North American distribution deal because work had to be done to get the product fully ready for distribution.
“We spent the last year and a half building the technology out, to get the tech securely to people working remotely through the distributor,” Agar said. “Before, we would have to customize builds through a portal for the client ourselves. Wee invested a lot and make it more flexible so this could be done through TD SYNNEX.”
Edwards said they expect TD SYNNEX to help them on multiple fronts.
“They have a very strong networking and security business, a platform business, and a mobility business unit,” she stated.
