While Check Point has the reputation of being a high end product that serves the high end of the market, they also sell to SMBs as well, and even though the focus this year was on high end strategy, their SMB portfolio got its share of important announcements.
Eyal Manor, VP of Product Management at Check Point Software Technologies
LAS VEGAS – Eyal Manor, VP of Product Management at Check Point Software Technologies, said that while the company made several interesting product announcements at CPX 2024 Las Vegas, the big news here was not really new products, but their platform and AI strategy.
“The most important announcement here is not Copilot, or another product,” he said. “These are supporting things. What’s important is what we drive as a platform. And what we are emphasizing is that the platform is driven by the cloud, and powered by AI. We are journeying from having been a company that provides point solutions to one that is focused on collaboration.
Manor said that Check Point’s focus on comprehensiveness and collaboration helps them differentiate from other competitors in their space.
“Everyone defines what the characteristics for their platform are,” he indicated. “One of ours is comprehensiveness and the second is collaboration. With comprehensiveness, the question is how many attack vectors you protect. There are hundreds of these, and we provide the most complete lists of ones covered. We don’t protect them all. No one protects 100%. That’s why no one will have just one security vendor. But they don’t need 70 of them.”
The second key criteria is collaboration.
“Whether you use Check Point products or third party products, more collaboration makes us excel,” Manor indicated. “With our comprehensiveness and collaboration, we have more than 20 third party integrations now.”
Manor also stressed that being a third party on the Check Point platform does not mean these partner vendors have inferior status.
“When some people hear ‘platform’ they think I’m the main screen everywhere and I’m the marketplace,” he said. “That is not my intention. Of course we would like to maximize on Check Point. But there is a reality and there will be a share of vendors. I want to make all products collaborating each other to stop the threat. It’s more modest than wanting to be the sun and everyone working around me.”
While the products announced were complementary to the strategy, Manor highlighted several of them.
“We introduced our Infinity AI Copilot in early February, which acts as a personal assistant, and which drives work for customers much faster, 10 times faster in my case,” he said.
The Quantum Force security gateway portfolio has also been significant expanded. Whereas it had previously consisted of nine appliances, ten brand new ones have been added, each more powerful than every one of the original ones.
“These new models are available now, and came to market because customers demanded more powerful ones,” Manor said. “Their energy consumption is far better than the originals – the new ones are not more expensive.”
Also new is Quantum Spark, which is specifically focused on SMBs.
“We are becoming very compelling to SMBs,with solutions like this one, that becomes strong through SMB,” Manor indicated. “Spark is a tiny devices – but with 5G connectivity, WiFi 6 and the best level of security, for up to 1000 seats. We sell them a managed detection and response system, so over the past two years, through a chain of MSSPS, we became very compelling to SMB businesses with 100 to 1000 employees.”
Manor noted that Check Point is not a company that focuses just on larger enterprises
“MSPs and SMBs have equal risks in case of an incident,” he said. “Many times they figure they aren’t a target, so they don’t have to build their own security, even though they can get it through partners and managed services.”
CloudGuard, their cloud protection solution, provides comprehensive cloud protection
“What we have focused on this year is the big problem is fatigue of alerts,” Manor said. It’s expensive manual work and not effective. By the time you go to the most important alerts, they are done. We are concentrating on the very few number of incidents you really need to care about. We can now condense down the number of threats to about 30, not 300 or 3000. That’s what we are doing today to protect the cloud.”
