France-based Exclusive Networks has announced channel veteran Jason Beal as the new president of its North American business, aiming to capture what Beal describes as a “golden age” for companies like Exclusive.

Exclusive describes itself as a security-focused distributor and channel services aggregator, focusing as much on the supporting services it can bring to bear for partners as the availability of products. It’s a role that Beal says is all the more important as solution providers rethink the nature of their business, particularly their profitability.

“I call it the partner multiplier concept. Partners are looking at dollars of product sales and how much they can monetize in different ways, in pre-sales services and consulting, in managed services, and in cloud consulting,” Beal said.

In the past, a VAR might look at the business like 90 percent products and 10 percent services. It’s much more common to see that mix much more equal or even shifting towards the services revenue. That has changed what they look for in a distribution partner, Beal said. When products were king, product availability was the most important or only factor in distributor choice.

“In the same way, they’re leaning on distributors to help them with that part of the business. They want services aggregation and to lean in on our resources,” he said. “It’s the centre of a weird vortex in the channel ecosystem today.”

It’s an area where Exclusive has been investing. In the last year, it has made a couple of strategic acquisitions, snapping up NextGen Group to help build its marketing muscle on behalf of partners and building a SASE and cyber-security practice with the purchase of CloudRise.

The company has Canadian operations centred in the Vancouver area and serves the country with both in-country resources and a shared services model with the U.S. Beal said that model will continue but insisted that he firmly believes in “local resources to support local business.”

“Every market is different, and we’ll have additional headcount to support the Canadian business,” he said. “We believe there’s an opportunity to help more partners and vendors grow in the Canadian market locally.”

In his previous roles at Ingram Micro and, more recently, Barracuda, Beal has often preached the concept of “partner empathy. ” He crafts partner programs that address partner pain points and aim to keep them simple. He said he would continue to drive that message to Exclusive.

“Every partner survey in the history of mankind has shown the same things. Partners want ease of doing business, to work with people they know, like, and trust, and to help build the top and bottom lines,” Beal said.

He said he’s taking particular interest in the move by more managed services providers to go deep on managed security services. He is also thinking about ways Exclusive can help them attain those goals with training and services support. It’s a significant shift he sees being driven by the “democratization” of hackers into the SMB space. As bad actors have increasingly looked at smaller companies as targets, the MSPs that serve them have looked to ramp up the security services they offer.

Like most executives new to the role, Beal said his early-day priority is listening to existing Exclusive staff, the company’s partners, and would-be partners and crafting a plan for where and how Exclusive can help partners meet their goals.

“They’re not going to see disruption. I want to ensure a smooth transition, but get out there, listen, and learn,” Beal said.