Name: Sophos Channel Business Update - AMER | Feb 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-05T18:16:12.707Z
Duration: 33 min 16 s
Description: Sophos Channel Business Update - AMER | Feb 2026

Transcript for "Sophos Channel Business Update - AMER | Feb 2026": Alright. Happy New Year, and, thank you for joining today's call. We have a full agenda starting off with some exciting program updates from the, always entertaining Brent Knoll. If you've logged on to the partner portal within the last week, you may have noticed a slightly different, look and feel, and that's because we changed it. So, Danielle's gonna join us today to walk us through some of the latest and greatest improvements for the partner portal and hopefully improve that experience for you. And then we're gonna close out with, Chris, giving us an update on our workspace protection bundle and OS update. So some really exciting product announcements there and, advancements from an OS perspective. Okay. Before we jump into the content, I wanted to take a minute just to recap some of the improvements that we've made to ensure that, your profitability, and the profitability of our partner program remains very, very strong. This is probably the number one piece of feedback that we get. And, from a partner concern and focus is is partner margin, so we take that very seriously. And, here's some of the changes that we made. In q three, late q three, we eliminated the deal registration minimums. So that means that all product now qualifies for deal registration unless it's superseded by a promotional offer. Typically, that's captured in the, in the fine print. But, all products now, regardless of the value of the transaction, qualify for deal registration. In addition, we added stackable deal registration boosters for new logo, and then we have deal registration boosters for certain qualified product. For partners that are participating in our growth rebate, we moved the targets back to a quarterly attainment as opposed to twice a year. And then we lowered those attainment gates and increased the payout value. So now it's easier to get into the money, and the payouts are, significantly higher, than what the program afforded in the earlier, iterations. And then last, we've extended the, we've extended the SPIF program across all metal tiers. So everybody from silver through titanium can now participate in our SPIF program, and that's a that's a program that you'll sign up for on the partner portal that we'll cover here shortly. So definitely take advantage of that. So, you know, our goal is to be the top vendor for you, just in revenue, but profitability, and and hopefully, these demonstrate these these improvements demonstrate that. Okay. A lot of you have called out the need to, make our technical enablement, more accessible and and consolidated, And maybe not in that order, probably consolidated than than accessible was the ask. So 2026 is gonna be the year of partner enablement for Sophos. We've created a fast track technical certification, program that we're gonna be running throughout The US and Canada, so it's regionalized. This is a a free instructor led training with on-site testing. So your engineers are gonna leave that training with a technical certification in hand that also qualifies for your program status. So scan this QR code. Trust me. It's safe. And that will pull up a list of the cities, and, I encourage you to sign up. If, we advanced the slide too fast, this is also on the partner portal. But keep an eye out, for a, for a training class that's coming to a city near you, and please take full advantage of that. Alright. And then we've also launched a partner survey that's gonna remain open through the end of this month. It's really all about the feedback loop. The changes that I just walked through, the improvements that we've made over the last couple of quarters, that all comes from your input. So please take the opportunity to scan this QR code, complete the survey. It's relatively short, probably less than ten minutes. I actually read every single one of these, the good, the bad, and the creative. And trust me, there's some pretty creative suggestions out there. But this feedback drives our actions, and and we take it very seriously. So please, take advantage of the opportunity, to provide your input and help us, make the improvements that we need to, help you be more successful in the partner program. Alright. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Britt Noel, I our part program updates. feel like you stole all of my thunder, but in the best way in the best way possible, Aaron. I'm that just. setting you up for the detail. We don't we don't bury the headlines around here. Right? We wanna we wanna lead with the the biggest bang. So I appreciate that, sir. That was a that was a great lead in here. So first and foremost and I've got my good friend, Barry Weller, in the q and a today. So feel free to to ask any questions as we move forward. But just a reminder, we do have our compliance review coming up here at the end of q four, and we are leveraging that new point space system. So when you log in to the partner portal, you will see what your active partner points look like. And, again, we're trying to make it really straightforward for you as you round out the end of the year. If you remember, we made some enhancements to the program earlier to make it a little bit more straightforward for our partners who are looking to maintain either their silver, gold, platinum or titanium status. But please, between now and the end of the year, please feel free to reach out to our partner care team. They are available 247. If you have any questions about where you sit or what requirements you may be missing in order to maintain your status moving forward, as well as your as well as your channel account manager as well. And just a reminder, all of our partner certifications and trainings now are are free of charge. If if y'all are gonna make the investment to to come and learn about our platform and go out there and evangelize for us, we wanna make sure there's no barriers to entry there. And then, also, the one thing that I'd like to highlight on here as well is that new quick start sales certification. It's thirty minutes designed, to talk about the Sophos platform and then how to manage some some core features in the partner portal, like on the opportunity management page around renewals and how we maintain your profitability, not only when you sell it in the first year, but throughout the entire life cycle of that customer as well. That quick start sales cert, like I said, is only thirty minutes long. And if you're an authorized or silver partner on the call thinking, hey. What do I need to do to to maintain my status as I move into next year? One of those quick start sales search would be enough to maintain your silver status as you go into f y twenty seven. So if you're looking around and saying, hey. What is it that I should be focused on right now? I always say, hey. That that quick start sales cert is a good place to start. And just a good reminder too, taking these certifications not only great to obviously advance your learning journey with Sophos, help you maintain your status in the program. But just a reminder that we are now offering these digital badges out to our partners as well. And we've actually made the sales professional badge a little bit more straightforward as well. When we launched that back in October, we said you needed all three of these sales certs. And now we're saying, hey. If you get the quick start and you've got one of those legacy sales certs, that's enough to go ahead and unlock that badge. And then, again, we've got continued badges here for our firewall and our endpoint architects. As we go into FY '27, we're gonna look to expand this digital badge footprint to make sure folks who, you know, are advancing their learning journey with the engineer cert have an opportunity to display their achievement as well. And a lot of folks come to me, you know, and will say, like, hey. The point system, can you can you break it down for me in a way that's really easy for me to consume? And I always like to put this in the in the lens of, like, a gold or a platinum partner. Because if you're a silver, all you need is one active certification and the revenue requirements to maintain your status. But if you're a partner who's looking to either move up to gold or move up to platinum, I always say start with the architects. For gold, you need one architect, and for platinum, you need two. That's gonna get you 75% of the way there. And then the desire is for our partners to be able to choose their own adventure for what makes the most sense to their organization. I always recommend starting with that sales professional since it's a consumable sales cert that can help get your sales teams up to speed on the latest and greatest. But we've got a lot of partners out there who are gonna go get more technical certs or more engineers or came to one of those boot camps that Aaron was just talking about. In no way are we dictating anything outside of if you wanna be gold or platinum. You need to have those technical architects. And then this was the the the item that Aaron mentioned earlier that I'm really excited about. And we announced this officially in our January newsletter, but I've been really excited to get on here and talk about it with the entire partner community. Historically, this deal close incentive or a partner spiff, it's probably the the better term to use here, has been available to our gold and platinum partners. And and we're really excited now to say, if you're metal tier, if you're silver, gold, platinum, titanium, we want to accelerate your reps profitability when they are helping us lead and find new opportunities and, you know, promote the the Sophos platform. Now there's just one extra step here. If you're a partner who hasn't participated historically, we wanna make sure that the onboarding experience is positive for you. So if you're a partner on the call today and you're saying, oh my gosh. I wanna get in this. I want my reps to be paid out via the rewards program. There's a very easy opt in process where we just validate your metal tier status in the program and then work to make sure all the right folks have access to log in to rewards and claim those deals. For these partners who are new, we are asking, you know, to be an eligible sales rep to claim or an eligible SE to claim that you either have an active quick start sales cert, that thirty minute cert we talked about earlier, or if you're an SE, you've got an active technical certification. There are gonna be some enhancements in the SPIF portal. We'll we'll be able to sort of ease this opt in process as we move forward. But in the current state, we just wanna make sure for new partners raising their hands saying, yes. We want in this, that that onboarding process is as seamless as we can possibly make it for you. So if you're listening today, download this incentive flyer off the partner portal. It's gonna have all of the terms and conditions, and that enrollment link is available right there. We just need one person from the organization to officially opt in, and then we can begin that onboarding process for you. The the online process sorry. I should have advanced to the slide while I was talking about the, the last piece. My apologies, everybody. It it's designed to be really straightforward. The reason, again, that we are walking through that online enrollment process for new partners so we can make sure they understand what the claim process looks like for a rep and also for our SEs as well. There is a slightly different process for the, eligible reps and the eligible SEs at a partner to claim their SPIFFs. But, again, that's why we wanna do that onboarding process to make sure it's as seamless as we can possibly get for you. So if you're listening here today and you're saying, hey. I want in this program. My part we are silver or we are gold or we are platinum, make sure you download the flyer, have one authorized member from your organization officially opt us in, and then we'll go ahead and begin with the onboarding process. And then last but not least sorry for the vertigo there, friends. Last but not least, Aaron mentioned this earlier, you know, SPIFs. Yes. Very important to help accelerate the profitability for our reps and our partners, but we also want to do that on from a discount advantage perspective. So deal registration, is gonna, right out of the gate, provide you with some really great price protected discount advantages when you find a new qualifying opportunity. And when you add these Doctor boosters to that approved deal reg, that's where you see your profitability start to skyrocket from a discount perspective on the deal. So when you get a deal registration approved, it's not only eligible for the SPIF we just talked about in most cases, but it's also available here from a Doctor Booster perspective as well. So again, if you have any questions about these, reach out to your CAE or CAM, reach out to your value added distributor, and always feel free to open up a case with partner care so that we can, help get any of those questions addressed for you. And I believe at this point, I get the absolute pleasure of handing it over to one of the best human beings I know, miss Danielle Ghost, to walk you through some enhancements we're doing in the partner portal. So, Danielle, I'll hand it over to you, friend. Thank you so much, Brent. Hi, everyone. We have enhanced our partner portal, and I'm excited to share with you what's new. Our focus has really been to deliver a more intuitive experience, making it easier to find resources and easier to, sell and market with us. So I'm gonna walk you through the key changes. Right away, you'll notice a more modern intuitive partner experience when you log in. We redesigned the home page very intentionally, to make it easier to find those important resources and updates that you need. And we really wanted to have it just the most important things that you need right at your fingertips. Alright. This is an area I'm really excited about. We have guided demand generation, and these are playbooks that, really make it easier than ever to execute a campaign and drive demand. And we have mark both marketing and sales playbooks. And each playbook, walks you through step by step how to execute the campaign with very clear guidance. And in each step, we provide the assets that you need. And one really exciting feature within these playbooks are customizable email templates. And these email templates allow you to, automatically cobrand with your logo, which is really exciting. So, you can do it right within the portal. You only need to upload your logo one time, and that will allow you to co brand. And it also pull the email template also pulls in your referral your unique referral ID so that we can make sure that we attribute your leads properly. And then one other area is we are introducing built in social media sharing. And this is really exciting because this allows you to easily link your accounts and be able to share posts directly from the platform. We do have a upcoming marketing circle webinar at the end of the month, so look out for an invite. We're going to take a deeper dive into these sales and marketing playbooks, and we're gonna show you and demonstrate how easy it is to execute a campaign. And this is one other major improvement we've made is we have a more streamlined asset library with search and filter capabilities, making it much easier to find what you're looking for. So as you're maybe planning for a meeting and you need a presentation or a battle card, you can easily come in here and find what you need or if you need marketing collateral. Just making it much easier for you to come in here and find what you need quickly. And lastly, we've updated and rebranded our partner locator for a smoother experience. We just really wanted to provide a smoother experience for customers looking for a trusted Sophos partner, and we've also added countrywide search. So quick update there. Alright. Yeah. So if you have not logged into the partner portal, we encourage you to log in, check it out, and know that we're continuously improving and we're optimizing. We want it to be the best experience for you. And, we do have we would love to have your feedback. Let us know your thoughts, and let us know what you'd like to see. This really helps us really helps us create, like, a better experience for you and shape shape what the port the portal looks like in the future. And, lastly, if you run into any kind of technical support, definitely reach out to partner care so we can get that resolved as quickly as possible. With that, I think I'm gonna hand it over to Chris for some product. updates. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me today to talk about some of our exciting new product releases. The first thing I want to talk about is our brand new addition to the Sophos portfolio, a product for you to sell that solves real customer challenges. Now as we all know, over the last few years, the traditional corporate network perimeter has been disappearing with workers, data, and apps increasingly residing everywhere. Most organizations now support a hybrid or remote work model, and this has created an incredible challenge and expense for many organizations to properly secure. Now before now, the typical way you would secure remote workers is via cloud delivered solutions, often called SASE or SSE. But if you've worked with any of these, you realize they have some major drawbacks. Routing or backhauling all of the workers traffic through cloud servers gets extremely expensive to operate at scale, and that price has to be passed along to the end customer. And so they're relatively expensive to buy. And these days, nearly all traffic is encrypted, and this creates a huge burden on these cloud based services to decrypt all that traffic, to properly inspect it and secure it, and that adds tremendously to the cost and creates usability or compatibility issues. And then you often need multiple cloud services to do everything that's needed. You need ZTNA. You need CASB. You need secure web gateway. You maybe even need firewalls as service. And these multiple cloud services often need multiple management consoles and multiple products adding greatly to the complexity. So it's really not surprising perhaps that very few organizations have adopted these kinds of solutions. And those that have are typically very large Fortune 500 type enterprises. So you must be thinking there has to be a better way. Right? And when you think about it, where does a remote worker spend most of their time? Online. And most of that is probably spent in a browser. So imagine if you could do all of this that we need to do in the web browser instead. Now you wouldn't have expensive cloud infrastructure, no traffic routing or backhauling, so it would be much more affordable and perform better. It works everywhere. On-site or off-site, it becomes irrelevant. It doesn't matter where the user is. It all works the same everywhere they go. And since the browser is already decrypting everything to display it on the screen, you don't need man in the middle decryption like you do in the cloud, so that makes everything just work and work much better. And you could secure all your apps, all your data, all your users with just one app and one console. Sounds pretty cool. Right? Well, that's exactly what we've done with Sophos workspace protection. We've built an endpoint centric solution rather than a cloud delivered solution. So let me draw your attention first to the right side of the slide, and that's what's included with workspace protection. You get the new Sophos protected browser. That's the centerpiece of this solution developed in partnership with island.io, who has developed an enterprise browser over the last several years. So it comes as a battle hardened, mature product. And we've integrated our ZTNA solution, Sophos DNS protection for endpoints, and email monitoring into an aggressively priced suite that delivers a ton of value and opens up a variety of new use cases. Now if we shift our focus to the left side of the slide, what do customers get? Well, they get everything they need to secure their apps and access to them and their work remote workers. They get our enhanced zero trust network access or ZTNA. It's integrated now into this new browser. They get full control over what SaaS applications can be accessed and how. Everyone is protected from malicious or unwanted websites wherever they go. And this combined with SaaS app controls can also eliminate shadow IT or the use of non sanctioned applications or for sharing files or even generative AI. And the broker or the browser itself is hardened. It's a Chrome browser, but hardened with added security. It's transparent and familiar to end users, but hardened against attacks and exploits. And organizations that work with sensitive data can ensure that it's accidentally copy and pasted or uploaded or downloaded or otherwise shared in the browser to prevent costly data mistakes. And customers get added insights into potential phishing attacks if they're not using Sophos email with this new email monitoring system that comes with the solution. And all of this is, of course, managed from Sophos Central, and delivery or deployed from the Sophos Cloud works perfectly with the rest of the Sophos portfolio, including Sophos endpoint, Sophos firewall because it supports synchronized security. So a lot of great new stuff there, but it ultimately creates a great new opportunity for you. This solution unlocks a new revenue stream for you. Most customers are gonna have gaps in their protection in this area, providing a potential greenfield for you to go after. It's a great way for you to deliver something unique. No one else is doing this. Everyone else has taken the cloud approach, as I mentioned. And as I said, it's extremely competitively priced. Workspace also gives you a way to seamlessly insert all those sort of hot topic use cases that have come up recently, like generative AI. You can help your customers safely adopt generative AI, block the services they don't want their data shared in, and allow these services they do want. And it allows you to demonstrate some real value for your customers, helping them to address the challenges that they've likely been facing for a few years now. And, of course, it's a great way to expand existing endpoint or firewall protection. It's a great complement to either or both of those products. As I said, it supports synchronized security, so it works better together. So in summary, workspace protection is an innovative disruptive solution in my opinion that will open many doors for you and add value for customers. And to set yourself up for success, check out partner news and the partner portal for the latest updates and for all the sales tools and assets. And you can actually access the, partner academy training and, webcast that we did last week. There's a recording of it there on the portal for you as well. Alright. So that's Sophos workspace protection. Now let's have a look at our latest Sophos firewall release, Sophos firewall version 22. There are three key themes to this release, as you could see here, Secure by design or hardening and strengthening the security of the firewall itself has really been a key pillar of our product strategy for a few years now. But with version 22, the team has taken secure by design to a whole new level. There's new features to help ensure the firewall is configured optimally and securely, and I'll show you that in a minute. There's a next gen architecture for added security and scalability. There's expanded monitoring of all customer firewalls by our security team for any signs that someone is under attack so we can help remediate it, and a new anti malware engine that introduces AI detections and secured updates now come to the firewall via SSL encryption and certificate pinning to ensure authenticity of all updates. And then the next pillar is network and scalability been enhanced for all organizations, but particularly large distributed networks such as universities and education or campus networks get, a performance boost with enhanced monitoring and logging tools as well. And then as with every software's firewall release, the team focuses on your feedback and continuously looks for ways to optimize day to day management. And you will find great performance enhancements in the management console, new SNMP monitoring for hardware, new enhancements in authentication, such as MFA support on the web application firewall, SHA two fifty six and five twelve support for one time passwords. All of this adds up to tremendous added value for customers. There's something for everyone in this release, really. And, Literally, you can see this is a long list of features that's in this release. There is something for everyone. I'm not gonna go through this list in detail. You you can take a screen cap if you want or access these slides later on your own, but this captures all of the great enhancements in Sophos firewall v 22. But I do want to highlight one feature, and that's the new firewall health check feature because this is a great opportunity for you. It's just one of the many secure by design enhancements we talked about, but this makes it much easier to evaluate and address any misconfiguration of the firewall. So it continuously evaluates dozens of different configuration settings across the firewall and compares them with CIS benchmarks or other best practices and provides immediate insights right on the dashboard into areas that may be at risk. And it makes it super easy by highlighting all the high risk settings and providing recommendations with a quick drill down so you can, go into the area that's of concern and see how you want to change it or if you wanna change it and, get it, compliant with best practices. This is a great way for you to reach out to your customers and help make sure their firewall configuration is optimally set up. So this creates a few opportunities for you. It really supports all your sales plays and scenarios for, you know, potential new customers. There's gonna be a lot of organizations out there with secure by design on the top of their mind because competitive firewalls have been under attack recently. No one is immune. And so, this has been a hot topic, you've got some great talking points with Sophos firewall version 22 around how we are delivering secure by design and taking the lead on this in the industry. And then for your existing customers, this release allows you to demonstrate some added value insights and functionality, gives you the chance to shine as a trusted adviser, encouraging the use of best practices and being able to help them identify where their firewall may need some optimization. And then last but not least, if you have customers that need to upgrade because their current SGUTM is coming to end of life, Sophos firewall v 22 has got all their top requested features and many things they don't already have today, so it's gonna be a very compelling upgrade for them. And to help our partners keep the competitive edge in firewall deals with Sophos customers, today, we're reintroducing our previous 10% deal reg booster for Sophos firewall. This provides an extra 10% in addition to your reseller discount for Southwest firewall orders with an approved deal registration for existing customers. So check out the partner blog for further details and a link to the promo flyer for that. And with that, I'll turn it over to our lovely host for the session. Chris, thank you. That's, that's great information. Nobody has ever referred to me as Lovely, so, you get extra extra points for that. Listen. There's there's a ton of content here. It looks like there's a a number of requests to get the presentation out. I think we can definitely do that. I think probably most of the questions are gonna be around the program enhancements and then workspace and OS updates. I'll tell you the portfolio is is really starting to round out and tell a great fabric story. That creates opportunity for our partners from a services creation perspective. So keep in mind that all of your channel account managers are trained up on the latest and greatest updates as well. So use them as a resource if you need some additional support. They can definitely help you out. But with that, I just would like to thank everybody for, spending their time with us this morning. The program updates, the the the new training opportunities, the technical enhancements that we covered, those are those are all designed to help you drive more value and growth in your business. And so please, again, send any questions our way. Reach out to your channel account managers. Take advantage of the the new boosters, the new deal registration policy. Those are all great ways to add profitability in your transaction. And with that, we we appreciate your partnership, and and we look forward to a mutually successful 2026. Thank you again for your time.