A second business from the same combination, which will focus on the McAfee Enterprise Secure Service Edge [SSE] business is scheduled to launch later this quarter.
Britt Norwood, Senior Vice President, Channel and Commercial Sales at Trellix
Today, Symphony Technology Group, an investment firm who earlier acquired both McAfee and FireEye, is announcing the launch of a new company, Trellix, that leverages the technology and other assets of both these properties. Trellix will be focused on the XDR [extended detection and response] area, which is a relatively new one in security that remains lightly penetrated, but which has been forecast by analysts to grow exponentially over the next several years.
The name Trellix is a play on the trellis, which is used to give flowers and other plants a controlled growth, generally up the sides of buildings.
“With us, we really think Trellix is appropriate for security,” said Britt Norwood, Senior Vice President, Channel and Commercial Sales, at Trellix. “A trellis gives flowers a way to grow successfully. As customers grow with digital transformation, they need to have an adaptive security platform, so that they can feel secure, and take advantage of all that’s available.”
The Trellix XDR ecosystem is designed to accelerate the effectiveness of security operations by providing the capability to ingest over six hundred native and open security technologies, and emphasizes leading with Open APIs.
“We are focusing on XDR because we see that as a huge market,” Norwood said. “From a partner perspective, it is very new, with only 5% penetrated today according to Gartner. However, Gartner also projects up to 50% penetration in the next 3-4 years. To deliver that, we need to stand on the shoulders of giants, including the legacy McAfee technologies like EDR and DP, and marry that with the technologies acquired in the FireEye merger to deliver a next-gen platform, and deliver the Trellix story.”
The plan is to soon roll out another standalone company out of what was McAfee Enterprise, and what now has interim Trellix branding, but will have its own name once it goes live. This business, which includes what was formerly the McAfee Enterprise Secure Service Edge (SSE) portfolio, will include Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA).
“This will be another standalone company, and we think segmenting the two will make them very strong,” Norwood indicated. “Each of these two companies will be led by a separate CEO. There will be shared services through Symphony, but not for the things that matter, like product development.”
The new Trellix will be a channel focused company.
“Our CEO, Bryan Palma, has said that we will be both channel first and channel led,” Norwood said. “Given Gartner’s projections of massive growth in this area, we are really building this to be resilient and adaptable, so partners can stay relevant with their customers. They can show them where customers would be vulnerable in a zero day attack. Our partners can have confidence that we will stay on top of this. We have an advantage over others in the space in that we have so many sensors in the field to identify what the threats are. We will also make it open, and lead with open APIs, and we want to work with both managed services and services-focused partners.”
Norwood indicated that while the change in focus would lead to some changes in the existing partner bases in the two companies, they don’t plan a major purge or to use this to dump smaller partners.
“The VAR-disti model is one that we will continue to embrace, and to accelerate as we go forward,” he said. “There will be some partners who will find that we don’t fit their Go-to-Market model any more, but there will also be ones we have never worked with who we will going forward. We will share our vision with all the partners and see if we have vision alignment. For those who have that vision but who are not quite there yet, we will set up a way to get them to align with us. We would like to take as many partners as possible with us on that journey. This is not about moving out small partners. It’s about vision alignment.”
All the products that make up the Trellix XDR platform are GA today, including Endpoint Protection Platforms [EPP], Endpoint Detection and Response [EDR] and SecOp tools. Trellix will be focused this year on continued integration of these products, automation and machine learning.
