Name: Sophos Channel Business Update - EMEA
Uploaded: 2026-02-10T11:30:57.095Z
Duration: 53 min 20 s
Description: Sophos Channel Business Update - EMEA

Transcript for "Sophos Channel Business Update - EMEA": Okay. Welcome, everybody, to our quarterly, channel update. I'm Jason Eyes. I'm I run the channel here at Sophos, and, we are absolutely delighted to have so many of our partners attend this call across our European, Middle East, and Africa region. So thank you very much. We have a very rich agenda today. I'm gonna give a quick business update. I talked about some of the solutions that we've been shipping recently and how they're doing. I'm delighted to be joined also on the call by Barbara Hudson from our product marketing team who's gonna talk about some exciting new solutions around workspace protection and, our Sophos firewall version 22. And then Anna, a regular on this call, is gonna give us an update on all things, marketing, and then we'll finish off, as we usually do, with a q and a. We've also got, on this call, slightly in the background, we've got lots of folks here from Sophos, across the business, from the program, and from the technical side. So if you have any questions at all, please feel free to use the q and a tool, and we'll endeavor to get through as many of those questions as we possibly can, during during the q and a session or or as or as they come up. All of the content that we are sharing today, including all of the links, are all available to you, after the call. So, if we, don't send it to you or you don't get a copy, please reach out to your district distributor or to your Sophos representative, and we'll make sure we get this, slide deck, to you. So, okay. So let me just kick off. So I just wanna start with a huge thank you, really. We had a very strong, q three across, Sophos and the business, and our partners play an enormous part, in that contribution. So I just wanted to say a big thank you on behalf of the whole of, Sophos. As you can see in the middle here, a big engine of that is the number of projects and opportunities and customers that we are working with our partners on. We have a a huge deal reg pipeline of over $1,000,000,000 that we are sharing. And, you know, over the last twelve months, we've seen a huge increase in the number of net new, customer opportunities. So thank you very much for that. It's a metric that we track every week, and we're very pleased with how we're performing around our new logo business. A big propellant to our business, of course, is MDR. We continue to grow faster than the market. Of course, we, closed the SecureWorks acquisition in February. That's added and extended our, reach into the market significantly, particularly in the enterprise space. And we can see continue to see more, obviously, acceleration in terms of customer growth, but also in the number of partners that are leading with Sophos, MDR. So we increased the number of partners by 35%, during the year. And probably the other thing to probably just to mention on here is our MSP business continues to be extremely strong. As we said before, we have a dedicated MSP organization. I would strongly encourage you to reach out to that team. You know, our MSP platform, is state of the art. I think it's market leading. It's entirely consumption based, and all of our technology is, pretty much on that platform. So if you're looking to build a services led consumption based business, then, our MSPT would be would be delighted to, hear from you. One of the solutions that we launched last quarter, was ITDR. Of course, this is a solution that can quickly identify and prioritize security gaps, look for anomalies, you know, credentials, exposed in things like the dark web. Very, very happy with the traction that we've seen, with this solution, and the projects that we've been driving since we launched it last quarter. We have made, our sales certification available. We've seen over 500 partners take the ITDR training in the last couple of weeks, and we've seen some deals, coming from that already. So thank you very much for that. Another solution that we launched last quarter was our endpoint 100 solution. This this is a product that's specifically designed for our s SMB space. Super simple, aggressively priced. Obviously comes with all of Sophos' award winning, security protection technologies, and super simple to quote. You know, we even have a one pager, as you can see on the on the right side of this slide, so you can quickly see your your the the reseller pricing, and, you know, it's super fast for you to be able to do a quote. In fact, quote's not actually required, and, you know, we've seen hundreds of partners, selling, endpoint 100. So thank you very much, for that. And there's more information, on our partner portal as well. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on our partner program. We have a huge number of enhancements and, and opportunities to, increase your profitability with Sophos. So just a a quick recap. We have announced a change to our deal registration program to remove all minimums. Okay? And I'll I'll talk a little bit more about that, in a second. We are, widening our sales fifth program, to include all of Silver, Gold, and Platinum partners, in the region. I'll talk a little more about that in a second. We added Tejas, the SecureWorks platform into the Sophos price list on the December 12, making it super simple for you to, lead and quote the SecureWorks business. Obviously, adding, other Sophos solutions, into the quotation. We've moved to a points based, certification process, and we built a super simple dashboard. I'll show you that in a moment. And we've got some developments, around, training, which I'll share, particularly around, all of our training is now free. So no longer do you need to, pay for sort of, architect training. We make that free. And, obviously, we are coming up to our annual partner program audit, and I'll and I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go through the the presentation. So let's talk a little bit first about deal registration. So this is a major change and a major opportunity, for our partners. So no longer do we have a, you know, a five k limit or certain products don't qualify. Now all solutions qualify and all deal values, qualify. So the process is exactly the same as as before. You register your opportunity. We review that opportunity to check that there's no other partner with that opportunity. That opportunity is then tagged as as deal registration. And when you go to create a quote, whether that's on, Sophos creating the quote or or yourselves creating the quote, the the quote would automatically pick up the deal registration discounts. Okay? That will do two things. Firstly, it will boost the margin that's available to you, on that quotation. And, of course, with our deal registration program, it will protect you, in that opportunity from from other partners. So in the past, if the quote wasn't at a certain size, the deal registration would not would not have been appliable on that quote. That's all that's all changed, and, you know, it's a big step forward for partners, particularly selling into the sort of SMB, sub 100 space. It's a it's a nice increase in in terms of margin. And talking about margin, we also are doing very well on our new partner, new customer booster. As you can see, the code on the far right here, if when building the quote, you also apply that promo code, we can boost your margin by a further 10%. Okay? So, I, again, will share the presentation, after the call. But if it's a new customer to Sophos, it's possible to earn an extra 10% discount. So, so that's still reg. We are also, as I mentioned, extending our SPIFF program. We call this the security champions program. It's super simple, to opt in, and we've included all the links here. I think we're gonna post them in the background here as well. So this is over and above, all of the sort of partner program, margins and things. So so this is a program that directly awards, the the sellers within our resellers and also the, SEs within our resellers. And you can see the table at the top right here, how much, is available depending on the deal size. So for example, I can barely see it on the screen, but if you've got an opportunity, actually, I can't read it from the screen. Sorry. But hopefully, you can see it from there. I'm looking at quite a small screen. But you can see here that you opt into the program. It's important that the person that is gonna receive the money is a certified person, and has a certification. So for example, if they're in sales, they need to have a quick start certification. That's a thirty minute certification that's available on our partner program. And likewise, for an SE, they need to be either an engineer, an architect, a technician, or they've taken the NPR guiding onboarding certification. We have thousands and thousands of, sellers and also, technicians and technical folks that have been, accredited already. So those folks will not need to take any new certification. They just need to opt in, to the program and to the links, that you can see here. So, again, over and above all of the margins, that we offer, this is a great way of earning some extra cash and some extra prizes, when selling, when selling Sophos. I mentioned before about training. So this is pretty quick and simple. All of our training now online is free of charge. So, again, that's all of the MDR guided onboarding, all of our architects, training certification, all completely free. And I just wanted to highlight one course that we have made available, which is our quick start. We've had over 1,500 folks take that test and certification over the last three weeks alone, and that gives a great summary of Sophos' solutions, how the partner program works, how the portal works. It's a great introductory, certification for folks that may be new to setting, Sophos. I strongly encourage you to to check that out, particularly if you have any new starters, joining your company. This is a great course for them to, you know, spare half an hour and get a great all around view, of, of Sophos. And just on training, as I mentioned before, we've moved, from a, quite a binary program of having a certain number of certifications, for partner levels to a very simple sort of points based program. So, it's now possible if you take our sales certification. For each certification, you get five points. And, actually, if you take more technical certifications, there's even more points. So you get 25, 50, and, 25 as you as you can see here. We also make available, a badge. Okay? So these can be marketed online. They could be used in, sales situations to help you differentiate, your folks, in in in the market. All of these points, can all be reviewed on the partner portal. So if we built a a new dashboard, so it's possible for each of our partners to go online and check how many points they have, adding up all the certifications, the sales and technical certifications, to check where you are as we move towards the March. So, again, with the partner program, we review our partner program and and levels at the March every year. There's two things that we look at. One is certifications, which is now points, and available on this dashboard. And then the other one is, is overall billings that we've transacted, through the year. And you can see both online. But today, I'm just highlighting the, points based dashboard that we have created. So, again, this is available, on the partner program. Please double check it in terms of, as you move towards the March. And just on the, overall partner program, I mentioned before, there's points so that you will need a certain number of points. The vast majority of our partners have enough points, but please double check that. I also wanted to clarify, the billings requirements have not changed. So the billings requirements that were in play the year before also apply this year. So, if you're unclear what those are, because they do vary a little bit by country, please reach out to your Sophos representative, or distribution partner, or go to the partner portal. You look up your country, and it's it's pretty clear what billing requirements are are required. So we've not changed the billings requirements year over year. So what you had to do the year before and what you have to do this year is is the same, and you can see that again from the dashboard, that's available online. Now things do change a little bit as we go past April. This is where we are introducing our new higher, billings thresholds. Safos hasn't changed those for five or six years, so this is the first change, that we made. But it will be the the the revenue bar will be higher, as we go past April. So what that means is if you're a gold partner, in this year and you reach, let's say, platinum, you or you reach a certain level, in May, in May, you will need to hit the slightly higher, threshold requirements, in that period, not not the ones that are in play, this this quarter. So all of that probably is explained a lot better, online. And, of course, if there's any confusion, please reach out to us at Sophos, or your distribution partner. We'll be delighted to take you through, what what is required and, of course, any gaps that you have in place. We are also announcing a higher tier. We did announce this earlier in the year. Our titanium level, that comes into place, from April 1. And, in the partner program guide, you'll see the titanium level now and its, different requirements, higher, billings threshold as as well. So, I'm now, I think, gonna pass over to Barbara. Please continue to bombard us with any questions that you have, and we'll continue to answer those as we go along. But for now, I'm gonna pass over to to Barbara. Thanks, Barbara. Thank you, Jason, and thank you everybody for joining us today. We're going to switch gears slightly and talk more about some of the recent product releases. And we have had quite, exciting new introductions and new releases in our portfolio. And obviously, with the holiday period sort of, you know, starting from December and going through, right through January in some cases, there may be some things that you haven't picked up on. So I just wanna recap on some of those protection. Now, as I'm sure you all know, your customers are struggling a little because they have their workers, their data, and their apps in lots of different places. And whether they're using private apps, SaaS apps, or web applications, they need that data secure, they need access secured to them, and they need to ensure that their workers that could be hybrid or remote or changing between different scenarios between the office, the home office, and any other public spaces where they happen to be working. This has proved proved to be quite a challenge because the solutions that were available to address this up until now were sometimes very sort of disparate solutions. Often, they were Internet hosted and so they required a certain amount of traffic back hauling. They were sometimes from different vendors. They had different agents to install. And we know that there has to be a better way to do that. And now is the time that we really need to ensure that we are not weakening security when people leave the office space. So the better way is Sophos workspace protection, and this is the new solution bundle that we're introducing that is a mix of both existing products and brand new solutions. It includes a brand new Sophos work, Sophos protected browser that we've developed in collaboration with Island IO. It includes Sophos Zero Trust Network Access that you all know already, I'm sure. It includes the new Sophos DNS protection for endpoints, which is new and we've already got DNS protection on the firewall, but this is a new for endpoints and it includes a Sophos email monitoring system. Now the way that people work today, they are doing a lot of things in the browser. And if that's done in a protected browser, which is a Chromium browser, which supports everything that a normal kind of Chrome browser would support. It means that there's no expensive cloud infrastructure. It means there's no traffic back hauling, which can cause latency. And it means also that for users, it's really easy to transition between on-site and off-site with the same experience and the same protection wherever they're working. All the content is already decrypted in the browser. And as with everything at Sophos, there is an easy management console in Sophos Central, which is also where these solutions are managed. So as you can see, it's quite a broad solution that we're now able to offer, and it allows you to address a lot of new use cases. We really with workspace protection, it doesn't really fit just in the network space. It doesn't fit in the end point space. It kind of fits somewhere in between. It's bridging the the gap and unifying the security from your firewall to your endpoint. And in fact, it can be deployed alongside anything else. So any customer that you have either new or existing is a candidate for workspace protection. And the great thing is that many people will not have a solution for this right now. There are a lot of hot topics that are, you know, in the news. You can't turn the news on without hearing something about AI, and workspace protection will allow your customers to safely adopt GenAI by putting certain controls in place about what GenAI GenAI solutions can be used, what can be shared in them, how things can be shared. There's also the topic of shadow IT, which has accompanied us for quite a while. That's also another use case that this can address. And I'm not gonna go through every one of these here, but the way that this solution is is built, it means that you've got a great way to be able to, talk to this alongside any other Sophos product. Now for those of you that have customers using Sophos ZTNA today, Sophos ZTNA will be part of the workspace protection bundle. And there will be a transition for existing customers from ZTNA to workspace protection. And in fact, anybody that owns Sophos ZTNA today will get the full functionality of workspace protection on February 28. That's shortly after the workspace protection GA, which is scheduled for February 26, which means that they will be able to use that functionality. There is a blog post. I'll share a link, to that in just a moment. But just for you to be aware that this this bundle, because of the way it is built, it does come with some changes for some of your customers. So it's very exciting to be able to address a lot of new use cases. And I think, you know, really building on what Sophos already has. As I mentioned, everything managed from Sophos Central, obviously, using the Sophos Cloud and some of our great solutions like Sophos Intellix, and also something that's very easy to deploy. You know, it shouldn't be something that's cumbersome or that requires people to completely change everything. One of our product managers workspace protection, Tejas Cash App is in the background. So if you have any questions about workspace protection, do feel free to type them into the chat and he will be able to answer them here either in writing or or live at the end. So what does Workspace Protection do for you as a partner? Well, it's a new revenue stream. And because it fits so perfectly into your ongoing opportunities, it doesn't require an awkward segue from, you know, sort of completely shifting gears to try to talk about something that doesn't really fit. It's it's really that conversation about how do people protect their remote and hybrid workers, how are they dealing with Gen AI usage today? And that gives you the opportunity to address that with workspace protections. It's not often that we have something that's sort of almost a greenfield, but as I mentioned, a lot of organizations will not have a solution for this today. And it really sort of unifies that, you know, your firewall is protecting your network, your endpoint is protecting the devices, and this is protecting everything else, the apps, the workers, all of the data. So this is a great thing. We're giving you the opportunity to get ready to sell before the actual GA on February 26. There is training available on the partner portal and there was a partner academy session. So if you missed that, please do take the opportunity to revisit that on demand, just to get up to speed on all the most important points about this great solution bundle. You can start identifying opportunities before the actual GA. And if you had a really current opportunity where you needed to be able to quote, software sales staff can actually quote this product already, but they can't sell it yet, obviously, because the GA is not until later this month. There are early access programs running for both the, protected browser and for DNS protection, so you can join those. And make sure that when you're experiencing those, if you've got questions, then please, make sure that you're reaching out to us. I put a QR code at the top about the ZTNA transition, and I see that somebody's actually asking a question, about billing, etcetera. Some of the dates are included in there. And we've included the information for both MSPs and term, and you will all be getting emails on this as well. If you have sold ZTNA or you have ZTNA billings on MSP, you will be receiving an email that gives you the exact information for you and your customers that when the usage and billing switch over for MSP and and how that affects you. But do feel free to ask any other questions to your local team or reach out to us here. I've included some of the most important links at the bottom here, and we'll post some of the things in the chat as well to make sure that you've got everything that you need. Now the other thing is that back in December when, it was actually a time when we had some of our competitors were kind of grappling with the aftermath of major cloud backup breaches or with other vulnerabilities. Sophos, somewhat too quietly, probably, launched a really impactful release for Sophos firewall in v twenty two. V twenty two did not get the launch that it deserved. And there are a lot of things that contributed to that. Obviously, the timing, December is an extremely bad time for a launch, but also we were in the middle of a web CMS migration, which meant that some of the changes for this on our web pages only went live in January. And so, you know, do check the web pages or any of those things, any of the, assets like the firewall brochure, they were all updated in late January. So there is a new version available for you there. V 22 takes secure by design to a completely new level. And this is so current because of the headlines that we're seeing. It's really important to be able to demonstrate that you are selling a firewall that is hardened against a lot of attacks and that really addresses some of those things that other people are grappling with. This is a key differentiator for Sophos. The key themes for v 22, just to recap very quickly, were, of course, all of the things that we've added for secure by design to really harden our product from the core, even excluding certain types of vulnerability right down at a code level. Secure by design is something that we take very, very seriously. And whilst more than 300 vendors have signed that pledge, to adhere to certain requirements for security to make products more secure from the offset, we're one of the few vendors that actually so transparently shares exactly what we're doing to do that. There were, of course, other improvements for networking and scalability and for day to day management. And as if that weren't enough, we threw in a few extra features who who which were particularly targeting our software's UTM customers as well. So there's really something for everybody in that particular release. This slide is really just there for later reading. I'm not gonna go through all of this, but it was a release that was absolutely packed with great new features. One of the main features was the firewall health check. And those of you that have joined any of our webinars on this will know that this is sort of near and dear to our hearts. I think that if I was working in sales today or if I was a partner like you, this is a great thing to be able to use in conversations with your existing customers. You could potentially even monetize this to really do a security review, talk about security posture, talk about ways to improve their configuration on their firewall. This is a mix of best practices and things based on the CIS benchmarks. Some of them are internal recommendations, but it's a great way to just, you know, revisit customers to look at how they've configured their firewall, how you've configured it, does it need changes, does it need some updates. It's available on the firewall initially. It will be coming to software central. So, you know, use this. This is a great, great feature that existing customers with extreme protection are getting at no extra cost. So Sophos firewall v 22 really strengthens every single sales scenario. It's adding value for your existing customers, as I mentioned, at no extra cost. It really does differentiate that. And I think for us, you know, winning new customers is great, but we also want to keep adding value for our existing customers, and that is really important there. There are, of course, some unique features will help you win new business. And particularly when we look at how this strengthens our position versus our competitors, we have a lot built into our firewall that other people will charge for. And when you're comparing us with other competitors, you really need to make sure that you're comparing apples with apples because not everybody has the same, functionality in their license bundles that we do. With v 22, it's really helping you as well. I know that some of you are still working on you may have remaining XG customers who had a license extension and so are still supported for a short while, maybe until as for as long as, June. This is another reason for them to upgrade because anybody still on XG that is still supported is only supported on v 20. They're not getting all these great features. And because we're in EMEA, of course, our software's UTM customers, this is another reason for them to upgrade. I know that there is a lot in here. And I know from personal experience and the fact that I'm sitting in Germany, how our Sophos UTM customers have a quite a different relationship to their Sophos UTM firewall. I absolutely respect that. But it's time to move on. And there's a lot of things that we can't and couldn't ever do with Sophos UTM that we can do with Sophos firewall when you just look at the broader ecosystem and synchronize security. So make sure that you use this as another reason to really push that. Jason was talking about deal reg boosters earlier, and I actually have a brand new one for you. As if we haven't given you enough with v 22 to be able to sell our firewall, we've reintroduced what was our previous XGS deal reg booster with 10% extra, partner discount for you built into this promo code. You can use it for all firewall opportunities that are deal reg eligible. And, it's sort of got expanded scope from how we had it previously. We previously have this, You have to have an XGS on the, quote. Now it suffices for you to have, for example, if you were selling virtual subscriptions, you can also apply this then. So make sure you're using that. It's extra money for you. We really want to reward customers who are going out and selling our firewall both to new and existing customers and make sure that you're already getting something out of it. We you'd know, it's it's a tough time at the moment when it comes to, competitive situations. And we know that a lot of our competitors are really, really going in hard to try and win some of our customers. And so we wanna give you some additional ammunition to be able to fight back and make sure that we're rewarding your commitment to selling Sophos products. So that's it for me. I'm gonna now hand over to Anna that's gonna take you through a marketing update. Thank you, Barbara. My name is Anna Becker. I'm the director of EMEA channel marketing, and I would like to give you an update and an overview of our marketing activities and marketing initiatives that will be useful for you and for your business growth. And the first, update, for you is, the fact that we have made some significant changes to the partner user experience at our partner portal. So we've been hearing some feedback, for quite a while about the user interface and about the speed of responses of the website. We'll listen to your feedback, and we have updated now the user experience significantly. So in a nutshell, we are offering to you on the partner portal a new more intuitive and modern experience of the search, of the asset library that enables you to find the assets that you are looking for much faster and in a much more efficient way. We also revamped our partner locator so that it's easier to find our partners on the partner locator, and it has a a a much better, much clearer, and more intuitive experience. In marketing, for us, one of the main priorities and goals is to help you and support you with your demand generation activities, with getting new customers, and with providing you with all the necessary assets and materials, so that you can run campaigns and generate new customers and expand the existing ones. That is why in on the partner portal, we have also updated and modernized the demand generation campaign section with quite a lot of automated functions, for example, a step by step step campaign playing book playbooks that will allow you in a very detailed way to go step by step depending on the stage of the funnel that your target audience is to run those campaigns in stages, either to run the whole funnel campaign or to run separate stages depending where you are. So we have your back whenever you are in the and your customers are in the funnel process. We are also providing a high quality co brandable print ready assets for your activities. Very often, we are as we are being asked for some source files for the printing, for events and train shows. Now they are all available, on the partner portal, downloadable, and comprehendible with this. We are also offering some built in social sharing to, amplify it, to boost the, effect of your campaigns through the social media. So please have a look into the partner portal. And one of the things that I will tell you here, one of the most important things, keeping in mind and bearing in mind that such a complex update takes some time. Right? And we are also expecting, and we are kindly asking you to give us feedback on the changes that we have made. That is why in the chat in the interacting function of this webinar, you will see the section docs. If you go into the section, you will find the link to the feedback form for the partner portal. Whenever you are, looking into the partner portal and, noticing something, that that something's missing or something's not right, please reach out to us via that form, and we'll appreciate the feedback. That is that is our common aim and goal here to make your experience of working with our partner portal more efficient and more productive. So please, we'll be looking forward to your feedback on this. Now moving on to some of the key activities for the current quarter. Here, so this is the the last and the final quarter of the fiscal year for us, and this is the quarter where we are focusing very strongly in marketing on on providing you with all the necessary tools, materials, and knowledge to boost your business and to generate more demand and to close your deals. So this quarter is we are focusing also very heavily on enablement and activation of our MSP business as well. So you can see we are pushing, and we are launching the Sophos MSP masterclass next week already. We are offering to our partners six very comprehensive sessions that are based on technology, MSP sales, and MSP marketing that will help you grow your business significantly. We are also inviting to those sessions external MSP experts, namely Olof Kaiser from the the Olof is one of the main MSP collaborating partners for us in the EMEA region, who is the MSP systems coach and helping MSPs grow their business, not only in relation to to SOPOS, but also in very generic terms, talking about the team structure, sales processes, scaling, and adapting to the new challenges of the market. For example, another external speaker that we are that we are inviting to present at the MSP master class is Tara Jane Sloan. Tara is the MSP expert in marketing and knows perfectly well how to generate leads for the MSP partners, and she will also be sharing quite a lot of insights into this. So please join us at the MSP master class starting from next week. We are also try we we are keeping you up to date on all the updates when it comes to Sophos business, beat MSP or any tech technological updates that we have. And you can join our MSP coffee talks on a monthly basis or a monthly technical updates where our sales engineering teams are updating you on everything that is new and everything that you need to know. And finally, being very personally proud that myself and my team, we are also updating you on a quarterly basis on our marketing campaigns and offerings. And in March, you will be able to join one of the detailed sessions on the previous enhancements to the demand check campaigns that I've shown before. And we'll walk you through it, and we'll show you in very much detail about the enhancements of the marketing section sections and campaign sections, and that will help you grow and, market yourself much better. We will be also posting the links to join those sessions, into the chat, and you will receive all those links, with the follow-up email together with the slides. So stay tuned. Now back by popular demand. You've most of you probably recognize the format. Right? And in starting from May May and June, we will be coming back with our main flagship event of the year for our partners, Sophos Experience Partner Roadshow. We will be joining you in most of the major cities in your countries to give you an update on what we are seeing in the market, what kind of trends and cybersecurity threats we are seeing in the market, and what is actually the business opportunity out of them. We'll be sharing with you our road map insights on the technology and how our technical road map supports the business growth goals and also the Sophos channel strategy. So what is it that we are doing to make it easier for you, our partners, to sell better, to earn more, and to be more successful. And, of course, you will get the opportunity to network with your peers, to exchange ideas, but also to have some one to one meetings with Sophos expert experts on the day. So stay tuned. Registration will be open shortly. Now I've been talking a little bit about the feedback on the partner portal before, right, that it is very important for us to hear you to get your feedback on on the partner portal. Right? And we're extending this feedback round also to a more generic experience of doing channel business with Sophos. And right now, we are running a global Sophos partner survey that is open until the February 28, and we are encouraging you to please give us the feedback on all the elements of working your experience of working with Sophos. It covers quite a lot of, areas and spheres. Right? And it is very important, for us because this is the only way how we can get how we can understand what is working for you, what is not working for you, and what we need to do to make it easier for you to do the business with us and to be more successful. So you can see the QR code. You will get the link, the direct link, to the survey. Please, reach out to us and, fill in the survey. It takes just a couple of minutes, but it will help us massively to improve to to improve the way we work with you so that you can grow better and the all the sales processes that we have within the company are more smooth for your success as well. Alright. And that's it from my side. In the meantime, we had quite a lot of questions in the chat. Some of them we answered already in the chat, and some of them we kept for the live q and a session. And I'm inviting thank you, Jason and Barbara, for joining us here. And let's then dive straight into some of them. So let me look through the questions. Now here is a good one that we have saved for life because we think that this will be very relevant to everyone. And I think, Jason, it will go to you. Regarding deal registration for SMBs, still gold and platinum partners have better pricing because of the SMB rebate structure. Are there any plans to address this problem? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Anna. So we're still we're looking at it. Obviously, the partner program benefits do improve as you go up the level, but adding DIL reg does close the gap fairly significantly. So because, obviously, it increases the discount available then and then protects the deal. But, hopefully, we'll have some other things to announce soon around providing even more protection. I can't I can't share those today, but hopefully, on the next call, we'll be able to go into those, Hannah, in in more detail. Thank you, Jason. There have been a couple of questions about the partner program updates and the new levels, the new partner thresholds for the levels. So one of the questions was, if a if a partner has all the requirements okay on the compliance page, but has zero points, will he still keep the level or will be down downgraded or upgraded to the next level? So I guess maybe, Jason, to reiterate very briefly how the upgrading and downgrading works for for the next year. Yeah. No. Sure. I mean, it is very important from the portal perspective that the points you need are reflected in the in in the dashboard. Right? So I would say and if there's a gap between, you know, the zero points and and and, our partners feel that it should be higher, then they raise that to their representative or their distribution partner, and we would look in to that. I think that would be a very small number of partners, hopefully. So, you know, we've tested the dashboard extensively, so it should be okay. But if there's zero points, and and that could be because the certification has expired and and and and maybe, you know, sort of a slight, you know, certification is required to to just bump bump bump that cert certification up. So I would just check that it's not expired. That might be why there's zero points. But, Anna, any concerns, the partner should drop us a quick note. We'll we'll get back to them very quickly. Alright. There were a couple of questions on a workspace workplace protection. Barbara, this one might will go to you probably. How will billings on workspace protection work, for instance, when a client has 1,000 users but only 200 remote workers using the ZTNA browser, but they they enable EMS with one hundred sixteen hundred mailboxes. So the, workspace protection has user based pricing, and we will generally take whatever is the highest usage from one of their, solutions that they're using, which component of it they're using. That will define, you know, the the usage that would be billed. So we won't, you know, we can't have different different, usage based licensing because it's one single, bundle. There is one single user based, billing or price for that. It's not split by each component of the bundle. All right. Thank you so much, Pavaro. If there were some questions in the meantime how to where where all the trainings and certifications are stored, we've answered this, but I'll just reiterate very briefly that in our training portal that you can access from the partner portal, you will find all the trainings and certifications required for you to get the points and maintain your partner level. So we have only one training portal, right, for your convenience, where you will see all the trainings and certifications. Alright. There was another question. Are there any updates on ongoing for partner portal quoting tools? Yeah. Anna, we are, we are working on a, an AI tool at the moment, behind the scenes. We have exposed that to our distributors, around the renewals business. So we have a pilot running, in The UK and in Germany right now, and we are looking to expand that, to everybody, in the next couple of months. We've we've a few enhancements we wanna add before we go wider. And then the strategy is to take that tool from our distributors, obviously, and then extend that across our partners. So, I would be hating to say it's probably around June, July time that we will have a integrated quoting and, and and and product information battle card competitive AI tool available to our partners to to use. And, I think it's gonna be very powerful. Obviously, it's AI. Right? So we're still developing that. But, hopefully, we'll be showcasing that very soon. So, yeah, look out for this space around that, I guess, Anna. And I'm pleased to say, Jason, that I actually only recently delivered, some quite comprehensive information about all our network promos to be used in that quoting agent. So, it might be AI, but it's got a bit of human intelligence in the background as well. That's good. That's good. Good to see you're involved, Barbara. Okay. And anything else? I think we've answered quite a lot of them. There were a couple of questions regarding the translations of the marketing materials on the partner portal, so I'll pick this one up. So within with the updated partner portal structure and the campaigns, right, we are working constantly on updating also the translations in our core local languages. As you can imagine, this translation process takes a bit of a time. Speaking of AI, we are also using AI tools for the translations, but at the same time, we all know that some human eye, and some guidance is still needed there. So whereas we are we are using the AI tool for the translations, we also have this human factor in verifying all the translations to for to enable you with the best quality of the translations for all the campaigns. Means that there is a slight delay in delivering the assets for the campaigns in the local languages. So bear with us, we are working on it and all our core campaigns that you can right now find on the partner portal into English language Okay. will also be translated with all the assets into our core languages in EMEA. All right. Oh, there is a new one, Barbara. I'm guessing this one will go to you. Considering the zero trust application model of space workplace protection together with the SD one enhancements in Sophos firewall v 22, what will be the first steps forward delivering a unified security posture strategy for customers in the EMEA region? I think that one actually needs a, one of our technical, contacts to respond to. So I would suggest that for that particular one that we'll get back to the the partner. All. right. We'll get back to you in person on this. Okay. Anna, should we leave it there? We'll but just in the interest of time, we'll we'll get back to any questions. I think we've answered pretty much all of them. But, if there's any more, we will, we will we will do that. If you could just have the slide deck come back up, please. Yes. And, again, everyone, I just wanna say, thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Anna. You know, obviously, there's a lot happening, a lot going on, lots of exciting new, solutions. We heard about some of those today, but there's even more. So please, check out, with your distributor and your Sophos representatives, how we can help you, grow your business. Obviously, lots of things going on with the program. Right? We talked about deal reg. No limits. Okay? So, great margin boost for our commercial, SMB space. We talked about, the sales champion program. Right? You know, rewarding the sellers and the SEs around selling Sophos. So please ensure that you opt in to that program. I think we've shared links, during the, during the chat here, but also those links will be on the, on the partner portal, but also in the deck that we'll send you afterwards. We didn't talk about it, but we mentioned that, obviously, SecureWorks is now fully integrated into the Sophos ERP and price list and quoting systems. So, hopefully, that makes that easier a lot easier for you to sell, SecureWorks moving forward. And we've moved a lot of the services from SecureWorks into, the Sophos ERP, price list as well. We talked about we moved to a points based certification, and we've developed a brand new dashboard so everyone could check where they are as they track towards the end of the, March 31. And then we also mentioned that we are all the training is free, so hopefully that that easy for you. If you've got any training to do between now and the March or any training beyond that, of course. And then we also talked about, you know, the requirements exactly the same as the year before up to the March, but they will change as we go into into the new year. So on that note, I'd just like to say thanks to the presenters again. We really appreciate your time. Of course, any other questions, please feel free to reach out. We'll be delighted to get back to you. Thank you very much. Thanks a lot, and see you next quarter.