Channel Awards: Q&A with Egress director of strategic partnerships Daniel Hoy

Hoy speaks to CRN about how he thinks the channel has changed over the past year

Why do you think awards like the Channel Awards matter?

In over 20 years working in the tech industry, with the last 10 spend in cybersecurity, the CRN Channel Awards has always been regarded as the highest accolade in the UK Channel.

The awards allow fast-growing businesses, such as Egress, to benchmark our progress against some of the largest competitive brands in the cyber industry and to demonstrate our success! The awards are a highlight in the industry calendar and provide a fantastic opportunity to network and celebrate with peers.

What would winning this award mean to your company?

Winning the CRN Channel Awards would mean a huge amount to Egress! Most importantly, it would be fantastic recognition of the considerable investment we've made to launch our global partner programme, which has regional focus on the UK, North America, and APAC. This investment has resulted in over 100% increase in partner-generated revenue growth in 2022 and over 200% increase in partner-generated revenue growth between January and June 2023. We've also become the first integrated cloud email security (ICES) vendor to achieve a global rollout of our MSP programme, offering full inbound and outbound managed services to our partners.

What would you say is your company's proudest achievement over the past year?

The last 12 months have been incredibly successful for Egress, due mainly to our continued investment in product delivery and service excellence.

Organisations are more vulnerable than ever to threats to email security caused by advanced phishing attacks, human error, and data exfiltration. With the sophistication of attacks increasing every day, legacy email security defences and security awareness solutions struggle to mitigate risk and protect businesses!

In response, Egress has become the first, and currently only, company to offer an adaptive security architecture for cloud email. Egress aggregates threat intelligence from multiple internal and external data sources to create unified human risk scores tailored to every user. By augmenting behavioural identity and endpoint data with email threat intelligence, we provide cyber teams with clear visibility of where risk lies, enabling them to shine a spotlight on areas of risk they'd not previously considered and giving them the opportunity to mitigate potential compromise with a matured set of eyes. Egress also uses these risk scores to automate threat detection and response. When a score increases against changes in the threat landscape, we dynamically adjust our controls to deliver real-time policy management for each individual employee.

What have been the biggest challenges of 2023 so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people helped with that?

For our customers and partners, 2023 has been the perfect storm from a cyber threat perspective! Changing economic conditions have squeezed organisational budgets and challenged necessary investment in key security programmes. At the same time, the sophistication of cyberattacks means that businesses are more vulnerable now than ever before. This in turn puts pressure on their trusted solution providers to mitigate these threats.

In response, Egress has worked extremely closely with our partners to ensure that customers receive the best technical solution and service to ensure demonstratable ROI. The Egress Intelligent Email Security platform is unique in the market. Through our AI-driven security, we mitigate more threats than any other integrated cloud email security (ICES) provider.

Continued investment in our channel ensures that partners can easily integrate these solutions and services into their portfolios and deliver the value on to their customers through enhanced security.

It is this product excellence, combined with our compelling competitive positioning, repeatable profitability, and support from the Egress Partner Team that has driven the partner growth over the last 12 months.

How do you think the channel has changed over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

Over the last 12 to 18 months there has been a considerable shift in how customers want to engage with channel suppliers and vendors.

Against a backdrop of budgetary constraints, organisations are demanding more from their suppliers. Gone are the days of the simple resell model: now, every supplier must demonstrate their value through consultancy and technical services, as well as commercially.

As a result, we have seen an increasing number of MSPs and MSSPs enter the market, alongside boutique cyber specialist VARs - all looking to build repeatable and recurring revenue streams. Inevitably, this has made the market more competitive than ever!

This should be a good thing for customers, who now receive enhanced services from their partners, as well as for vendors like Egress, who can demonstrate competitive and technical excellence to support our partners. I anticipate a further service consolidation, which will improve technology and the support organisations receive from their partners.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the channel in the coming year? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

The level of global cyber threat will continue to increase into 2024. Attacker are becoming more sophisticated every day - and businesses, suppliers and vendors will have to respond!

For Egress, this represents an opportunity for accelerated growth. The investment in our product, our partners, and our customers mean we can mitigate threats and demonstrate rapid return on investment. In a growth market, this customer and partner advocacy represents an exciting new phase for the business as we look to continue our global expansion!