Malwarebytes’ Mike LaPeters: Convergence, Unity Fuel New Channel Strategy
… the managed services space. If you look at the evolution of security, if you look at the fact that what made you secure yesterday is not keeping you secure today, with how challenging and difficult it is to be secure in today’s world, it’s screaming for managed security providers. It is absolutely begging for a specialist that can focus solely on security, that will be able to help businesses. There’s no reason why a business needs to build a huge security staff to keep current when MSPs or MSSPs can do it for them. So Malwarebytes gets that and the focus that we’re placing on product development, marketing and investment in channels is all leaning toward the expectations that MSP is going to be a huge contributor to the acceleration of Malwarebytes‘ growth.
CP: What percentage of Malwarebytes’ revenue is coming from the channel, and are there plans to increase that?
ML: Well over 50% is going through the channel, but I would say, especially with the addition of acceleration through MSP, we expect that to grow. There’s expectation of significant growth that’s going to be delivered because of our engagement with the MSP channels. When I look at this and say the opportunity for us to have accelerated growth is probably more on the MSP side than the MSSP side, the only reason why is there’s so much fewer MSSPs than there is MSPs. If you’re looking at percentage of penetration, if we did 1% penetration into both markets, our MSP count would crush the MSSP accounts because the numbers are so skewed. Arguably there are 5,000-7,000 MSSPs in the world, and that’s if you’re very generous on your definition, whereas you look at MSPs and there’s probably 300,000-400,000 just in North America. So it’s a very different market opportunity, but it doesn’t change that fact that we’re still focused on both. MSSPs need to be able to provide the benefit of the technology we provide. So we’re going to continue to work with them and then MSPs are dipping their toe in the security water and we are an excellent technology platform to leverage as they’re experimenting in the security space.