Name: Sophos Channel Business Update | Feb 2026
Uploaded: 2026-02-04T05:46:03.874Z
Duration: 52 min 56 s
Description: Sophos Channel Business Update | Feb 2026

Transcript for "Sophos Channel Business Update | Feb 2026": Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us today for our quarterly channel update. Just so you know, we are recording this session and a copy of the recording will be shared with everybody post session. As well as if you do have any questions throughout the session, please feel free to pop them in the q and a panel on your right hand side of the screen. I will just give it another couple minutes here for everybody to join before we get started. All right. Well, thank you, Sharnell. I just want to double check. My audio is on, and it seems to be on. So let me kick off our quarterly channel partner update. Welcome to our partners from across the APJ region. We are about to start with our q four quarterly channel updates, and we have partners joining from across the region, Japan teams and India teams as well as our ANZ region, our Greater China team, as well as our India and Southeast Asia teams as well. So welcome. We are joined today by our partners, distributors, and MSPs from across the region. Well, we've got a really exciting update for all of you today, and I'm just gonna bring up the agenda that we are planning to cover. Firstly, we'll take a few moments to share with you how the business has been performing in the last quarter across APJ and just share some appreciation and some highlights, which many of you, I'm sure, will be excited to see from each of your regions as well. We are and we're planning to be joined by Dale Rabno today on our partner programs update. I'll be covering some of that messaging in Dale's absence this afternoon. We'll then hear from Shonel Willis, who's our marketing specialist and marketing manager for APJ working very closely with partners. We were in region in India a few weeks ago, and some really exciting updates from Chanel today as well. And then our special guest, Chris, welcome. Chris McCormack from our product team. Chris, great to have you on the call, and we'll hear from Chris a bit later on the new Sophos workspace protection and the new features on Sophos firewall version 22 of the firmware. Some really good updates there as well. With that, just note we will be taking questions and doing a q and a session at the end. Please put your questions into the Q and A box, which you'll see up on the screen as well. Without further ado, let's jump into the welcome and the updates from across the APJ region. I have met many of you and been in the field with a number of our partners and distributors over the quarters during this year, and want to extend a sincere thank you, not just for the business and the commitment we've seen year to date, but in particular from the last couple of months, as we've been through some transitions with programs and new go to market models and some new teams in different markets, Sophos and APJ came up as number one globally in terms of year on year performance, and that is down to you, our partners, and the performance we've seen in the last quarter. So the period we're talking about is October through to December 25, and just an amazing finish to that calendar year across the globe, and particular in APJ. We saw our partner deal registrations spike to almost 40% year on year in terms of booked and approved deal registration billings, and then a further 20%, so double digit growth in the volume, quantity of our deal registration approved deals. So thank you to you, our partners, and thank you to our distributors who bring those deals into the new portal. You would have seen products like our Tejas MDR platform coming onto the deal registration portal as well last quarter, and we've seen a volume increase here, predominantly because we've taken away a lot of the gateways around the deal sizes and offered our partners the opportunity to bring a deal of any size that you're looking for that exclusive discount protection through deal registration. Japan globally finished number two in our SecureWorks Tejas business. This is based on our acquisition of the SecureWorks business last year. But as a separate business unit, as we start to integrate those MDR platforms in our product roadmaps, our global business Japan, we're top two globally with growth, and some very large customer sizes, well over 20 to 25,000 user customer environments. And so when we talk to our customers, and many of you are talking to your customers, SMBs, mid market size companies, know that Sophos is certainly starting to expand and look for more customers in that mid market enterprise space. And here's the classic example of the success we've seen in Japan. Last couple of points, our MDR business continues to grow. This is our managed detection response core business, and as we integrate product roadmaps over time, which we'll talk about, we still see very strong growth in our MDR business and a lot of opportunity and tailwinds there for the partners as we move forward. Now this is also further complemented by our MSP partner ecosystems. We see a high level of activity with our MSPs across the region, and we thank you for your commitment, but we are also seeing strong growth from a number of our MSP billings, their monthly recurring revenue, as we progress out of q three. Now India and our Greater China region, we wanted to call them out for really good growth, number one, number two globally in terms of the q q three period last quarter, and congratulations to our partners and our teams in those regions. And then finally, while we've seen mature Tejas enterprise security platform business out of markets like Japan and Australia, New Zealand, parts of Southeast Asia. We are starting to see more business now coming out of India, Philippines, and other parts of Southeast Asia as well. Enterprise security platform supported by our Tejas MDR service and solution. So with that, partners, really a sincere thanks from all of us and myself and the channel teams for your support and commitment in the business across APJ. With that, we are just a few days away from celebrating the Lunar New Year, and this is the year of the horse. And we're wishing you, all of our partners, a year of soaring prosperity. It's time for a fresh start. And the year of the horse is really focused around strength and speed. And it reminds me a lot of where we are going with our partners, particularly in the year ahead, FY '27, but also the momentum we are driving with you, our channel, over the coming months as we close out the year. So best of luck. We wish you a lot of prosperity and a lot of success in the year ahead. And for those countries and partners celebrating, enjoy this time off with your families and friends. Now, before we jump into the partner program and channel program updates, I thought we'd just take the opportunity to remind you, we currently have our partner and distributor partner survey open at the moment. Thank you for the partners who have responded. This is a five minute up to ten minute few questions, only 10 short questions. Please jump onto the survey. We will be sharing this slide, and you will get that QR code, which is available. It will take you straight to the survey. Please share your feedback. We are looking for feedback that's constructive. We're looking for ideas to improve in areas, and how US partners and distributors are engaging, and how we can do better. So thank you for your feedback in advance. That closes at the February as well. Now I am going to pause and just say we have had a tremendous year of innovation and change for the good in many areas of our partner program. We've got new teams that have come in and restructured new elements within the program and brought better, more enhanced benefits for partners across the board. And what we want to do now is take a few moments and just remind our partners what these changes look like, why they are important to you, and I just want to make sure that we cover this in the right level of detail. First of all, when we talk into our partners, we start our financial year at the April every year, so we're coming up to the end of this fiscal, we'll start the new year from April 1. What we'd normally do is run your data, share that information with you via the partner portal, how have you done on your revenue, your renewal, closure rates, your certifications, and accreditations. But here, what you'll see in the new partner program portal is the new dashboard showing you your accreditations, how you can track and add certifications that might be missing, how you can be tracking your renewals, as well as verifying does your organization, does your partnership with Sophos meet the necessary requirements for training, billings, renewal closure rates, even in some cases, our titanium and platinum partner categories, where we have a business plan, and we sit down and we track a number of business objectives together. And so with that, you will be able to now see your FY '27 status represented on the partner portal page. I encourage many of you I actually did it the other day for our demo login to the partner portal page. Have a visit of the new portal, accept the Ts and Cs, and you'll start getting a lot better visibility into how you're tracking with your partner's status in the year ahead. This is not just for the administrators on the page, but also the secondary and primary users that visit the partner portal. So moving ahead, our enablement teams globally have been working in line with our product and BU teams around the launches and announcements of a number of our products. We're going to hear from Chris and the team a bit later today. Workspace protection. You'll all remember we announced the intrusion detection and ITDR, Threat Detection Response, last quarter, and enablement and training is now available for partners. Please have a visit to the Sophos Partner Portal, look at the partner training updates, you'll be able to see how you accumulate and build up your training and certification points. But we've also included a new quick start guide that's a very quick video reminding you about where to navigate, what to look out for, how to register deals, how to start market development fund campaigns with the local teams. So please have a look at that, and look out for the new sales courses that will become available for you as partners. In supporting that, as many of you will remember, we announced the launch of new digital badges. These are the sales technical certification badges. But in addition to that, we have also included a points based system for all partner tiers globally. This will be our new standard in accumulation of points leading to your partner tier category, be it silver, gold, platinum, and even our new titanium status that we have announced. So for partners that do their sales certifications, you might look at doing the quick start training, you get five points. There's another sales fundamental training, you get a few points for that as well, and then the MDR sales accelerator. Those are our sales certified digital badge trainings. They can be completed by anyone in your organization, and certainly your sales teams will get a good refresh and reminder of some of the basics of working with Sophos, navigating the partner portal, and also some of the really important competitive differences on some of our products as well, and how to sell them. On the technical certifications, partners are earning more points. You can see engineers, 25 points architects, technicians, anywhere from 25 to 50 points. As those points accumulate, they contribute to your architect digital badge, which is also something that contributes to the partner tier category. Have a look at the training page on the partner portal. We won't spend too much more time on that, but please and I'd like to also extend a congratulations to many of the partners in APJ who have already earned your sales professional badges and some of these architect digital badges as well. So we appreciate that, and so thank you. For some of our business owners and the sales leaders, maybe some of the technical managers, you're working with your teams around certification and training, This is how those points accumulate and complement your partner tier categories. So today, if you're a gold partner, you are required going forward in the partner program to have up to 100 points. And the way those points can be achieved through training and certification is one architect is required to be a gold partner, and that would be one architect training of 50 points, and one engineer training of 25 points. That gives you a total of 75 points for the architect and the engineer training. That's 75 that goes towards you 100 points. And then there's many other sales courses like the onboarding guides, like the MDR essentials or the sales security essentials, any of those trainings also accumulate to get to the 100 points. In order to move to platinum and gold, as you move up the partner tier categories on the metal levels, you will be looking to increase that, you know, twofold, threefold, depending on the partner tier category. Now this is around certification. Many of our partners and many of you will be familiar with this. This is just a reminder of how the POINT systems will be working going into the new year. We will also make our new partner program guide available, where you'll see step by step examples of how this works on the certification page. Now, let's talk about our Q4. This is our January through to March 2026. So our Q4 period, this current quarter, we are offering partners the ability to earn rewards and Sophos points in our rewards program. This is available across APJ. There may be some select countries that we are still to activate, so please look at the terms and conditions, but generally, this is available to countries that we have previously launched rewards SPIF programs for partners across the APJ Region. What are we rewarding in this quarter? What are we incentivizing? You, the sellers, and also the technical teams, the SE teams at our partners. We're looking at two areas. One is new logo. This is a new logo to Sophos, a customer that we've not sold to before, we haven't sold to in a number of years, and we classify them as a new logo or new customer count. There is also the expansion, the upsell, cross sell, and even true up of opportunities, what we call expand business into your customer base from where they might be on endpoint going to MDR, they might be on certain technologies moving to a newer version or an upgraded version or truing up some of their asset licenses. So have a look at this new SPIFF. It is available to partners. We published this a few weeks ago. We bring it up on the quarterly business update as a reminder and refresher. Any partners not on the rewards program today, you will have to opt in. This is an opt in program that's available to all partners, but you would need to go to visit the page, fill in the online enrollment form. And in fact, if I show you what that looks like in step by step, the Sophos Rewards enrollment would need to be initiated by you as the partner. So eligible partners, please check which countries are eligible across APJ. Once you have submitted your enrollment confirmation through the partner portal, we will be notified through our partner care team. They will take a few days to verify your details and then activate you on our rewards platform, and you can start redeeming points and rewards for your sales on new logo customers and any expansion opportunities. Just gonna quickly go back one slide. We don't normally do that, but you'll see on the bottom left of that new logo and expand deal close incentive slide, there's a flyer there. We will send you a PDF version of that flyer with all the Ts and Cs and details around this exciting SPIFF. So get in, have a look, think about any new customers, new logos you're talking to at the moment, even expansion opportunities with your existing customers, you can definitely be earning some really good dollars in this new SPIFF on the rewards platform. There's a step by step guide which we'll share with you afterwards. And for partners that haven't used this before, eligible reps, this is not available just for your company, but for you as a sales rep or an SE at the partner. So you want to log into the partner portal, access the rewards page, you'll go and find the different promotions that are eligible, and then you'll be able to submit a claim for those points. Really exciting. For those of you that are interested, please jump in, opt into that program, and and you'll you'll be able to get some rewards for yourself and redeem those points. Now with that, I'm going to hand over to Sharnell, and Shah will give us an update just in one moment, actually. Sorry. Let me close off on the team in plans. Apologies. So Sophos globally have announced the enhanced benefit for partners when our sales teams think about the territory account managers, major account execs that you work with across the APJ theater, it could be Japan, India, Australia, you may be working with some of our sales teams and they have sourced an opportunity. They want to bring you into that opportunity. You have a relationship with the customer or the account. You may find that you haven't been eligible for deal registration, because the deal registration is normally when you have sourced the deal, and we have approved that extra exclusive discount for you as the partner with an approved deal reg. But when it comes to teaming plans, this is where the Sophos rep or Sophos had found that opportunity. It might have come to us through a lead, through a lead development rep, through one of our agencies, etcetera, but it's an opportunity we have found. We want to bring a partner into that opportunity. We want to team with you and partner with you on that account or that opportunity. You will get some price protection. You will be enabled faster and get better engagement with our sales teams involved. And this is typically designed for opportunities where we go into our mid market and enterprise size customers anywhere from a 100 users and above, and in some cases, from 500 users and above. So take that into account, this is a new model that we've introduced supporting where deal registration may not be eligible for our partners, we've introduced the team in plans. A lot more information we'll be sharing, including enablement and some scenarios for you, our partners and distributors, of how that works. Any questions you may have, please reach out to myself or any of the channel reps on the team and plans. With that, I jumped ahead, but I'm going to hand over to Shaunell for the partner portal and marketing updates. Thanks, Shaun. Beautiful. Thank you so much, Chad. So, yes. So I do just wanna take you guys through some updates that we have made to the partner portal. So if you've have logged into the partner portal recently, you would have noticed that we have, have a totally new look and feel. So this update is very intentional, and it reflects our focus on making it easier for you guys, our partners, to market, sell, and succeed with Sophos. So the portal's been redesigned to deliver a more modern and intuitive experience. So our navigation has been simplified, friction's been reduced, and you can now quickly find what you need. So whether that's your sales re tools, your marketing resources, or your enablement content without having to search across multiple locations, which which I think we all sort of experienced in our previous iteration of the partner portal. You'll also notice that we've made some improvements into how our content and guidance is actually organized. So the new portal now offers clear partner journeys that are gonna help orient you across your onboarding, training, your certifications, like Chad mentioned before, as well as those key sales motions. So this is to provide you with better structure and visibility into what's actually available without adding additional complexity. So another major improvement is that we've streamlined the asset library. So it's a lot a lot easier to find the things that you're looking for. So we've improved that navigation and search function. So it's faster to locate the right presentations, the right campaigns, and tools. And this is a really key piece, especially when you're preparing for your your customer conversations or your activations. We've also done an update and rebrand of the part locator tool. So we really wanted to improve that customer experience and help ensure we've got better visibility for you guys when customers are actually looking for that trusted Sophos expertise. So overall, the new partner portal is is all about sort of removing that friction that you guys had in the past, improving the access to resources, and setting a really strong foundation for everything that follows. So if you haven't logged in to the partner portal yet, I highly encourage you to log in, have a look around the portal, and and see what's available to you. So we've also introduced, smarter, guided demand generation programs for you. So, these are designed to help you guys actually move your customers through the buying journey that they're on to help enhance the marketing activities that you're that you're already doing or that you maybe haven't started quite yet. So these aren't just individual assets. They're actually structured programs and campaigns that can help you generate your demand more consistently. So you'll now see that we've got personalized campaign playbooks for the various campaigns on the portal that are going to provide very clear step by step guidance in how to actually execute on the marketing campaigns or the sales plays that we're we're currently focusing on. So these, playbooks will show you what to do, when to do it, and which assets you're gonna wanna use at each stage of the activities that you're doing. A really core part of this experience is that we've got the customizable email templates. So these templates can now automatically co brand with your company details and pull in your unique referral ID. So all the leads that you're generating from the activities that you're running are gonna be captured and attributed correctly, and you're gonna be able to track all of those in the partner portal, under your leads. And just on that, automated co branding, this is a really important piece. When you log in to the partner portal, you wanna make sure that you're going to your, your profile in there and updating the company section in your profile. So in that section, there's actually a spot for you to upload your company logo. Having that logo in is what is actually going to power the co branding function across all of the emails and your the marketing assets. So when you log in, make sure that it's up, uploaded and up to date because this is a really important first step to make sure that all of those assets are already ready for you guys to use. We've also introduced for the first time ever built in social media sharing. This is something that I know a lot of you guys have asked for in the past. Why doesn't Sophos have this? Well, we finally made it available. So now when you go into some of those social and digital assets, you're gonna be able to really quickly share that content across your social channels to help sort of expand that reach and engagement that you have. So it's really easy to do. You choose the tile that you want to promote, and you click on the LinkedIn button, and it's gonna post that for you. So really, really cool feature that we're really excited about and really hope you guys utilize. In addition to all of that, you'll find that we've got ready to use assets. They're all professionally designed materials, materials that we use ourselves in marketing, that you can immediately start to activate across all of your digital campaigns, your events, and then and those customer conversations. So the overall goal that we've had for this guided demand gen experience is to remove the complexity that we've had in the past, and really provide you guys with all of the structure and the content and the automation so that when you have it, you can actually just purely focus on the execution and the customer engagement and your follow-up. So this is a really exciting, time with our updates to our our demand gen piece. And on that, we are actually going to be running a marketing circle webinar, in early March. So really keep an eye out for that invite to come through because we are actually gonna go into this guided demand generation piece in a lot more depth in that session and really talk about what, good campaigns look like and how you guys can execute them. And then finally, I just really wanted to talk about how we, in marketing, are aligning to our like, the sales plays. So we are very committed to winning with you guys and winning with our our sales teams, whether that's through content, insight, or direct account support. We want to continue to invest in every lever that can help, convert pipeline. So we need to win together because if we don't win together, sort of no one wins. So some of those key sales plays that we are really aligning to is that MDR everywhere piece. We've got prebuilt campaigns already ready to go in the portal that really supports that MDR everywhere motion. So if you're looking to activate an MDR campaign, the neutralize cyber threats twenty four seven campaign is a really good one for you guys to do that with as well as the prevention first campaign. Another really key, sales motion and marketing motion is the enterprise and Tejas amplification. As you saw in in Chad's slide, with Japan absolutely thriving, in the Tejas space, this is a piece where we really wanna amplify, and we are actually currently working on building out, a new enterprise campaign that you guys as partners can activate to help you drive more of that enterprise pipeline. Firewall competitive displacement, another really key motion for us, and we do all already have an updated, firewall displacement campaign ready to go in the partner portal. So if, firewall displacement is something that you're really wanting to target at the moment, I really encourage you to pop in jump into the portal and grab that campaign. That's gonna be a really great asset for you guys to start building that out. And then selling the stack, expansion. So we've got an amazing SPIFF program going on for expansion. So really make sure when you're talking to your existing customers, you're looking at what else can we help them with, what can we attach, and and how can we do that. So that's a really good one, as well as advisory services. We wanna make sure that we're supporting customers and yourselves with, threat profile assessments and, content and assets as well. And then enablement. We wanna make sure you guys have everything that you need to, actually go out and sell. So, joining this session, for those of you who joined our academy session last week, we wanna make sure you guys are ready to go and have everything you need. And with the marketing session coming up, I really highly encourage you guys, especially to get your marketers registered for that session because it'll be a really good one, for them to learn how they can actually activate these activities. And with that, I will then pass it over to Chris. Thanks for having me today to talk about our exciting new product releases. The first thing I wanted to cover is a brand new addition to the Sophos portfolio. It's a new product that you can sell that solves real customer problems. Now what are those problems? Well, as we know over the last few years, the traditional corporate network perimeter has been dissolving and workers, data, and apps are residing everywhere. Apps can be in customer data centers or public cloud infrastructure. They can be SaaS apps that customers rent or they can be web applications. And most organizations these days have a hybrid workforce of on premise users and remote or mobile workers. Some might be all remote. But at any rate, they have this mix of workforce often that is working at home or in public spaces or sometimes in the office or transitioning between all three. And this adds up to being an incredible challenge and expense for many organizations to try and properly secure. So the typical way you would solve this or secure your remote workers if you're a customer is you'd look for a solution called SASE or SSE, which are cloud delivered network security solutions. But these have some major downsides. First of all, you're funneling all of the remote workers traffic with these through some cloud infrastructure, through a cloud point of presence somewhere. And that gets extremely expensive to operate and scale as you can imagine because all that traffic adds up. And that price has to be passed along to the end customers so these services are relatively expensive. It also requires backhauling all that traffic through this cloud infrastructures through a different location which adds latency, creates inefficiencies, and can actually create usability issues with geolocation. And, of course, these days, almost all traffic is encrypted. So this creates a huge additional burden on these cloud based services to decrypt all that traffic to properly inspect it and secure it. So that adds tremendously to the cost as well. And then as I mentioned, multiple cloud services you need for various different aspects of a remote worker's life or you just need all of these different types of solutions. They all add different management consoles. It can be different agents, can be different licenses, can be very complicated. So not surprisingly, most organizations haven't adopted one of these solutions. Unless you're like a Fortune 500 huge enterprise, you probably don't have anything for your remote and mobile workers because you're waiting for a better way. Right? There has to be a better way. When you think about it, what does a remote worker spend most of their time doing? While they're online, most of that interaction they have with applications is through their browser. So imagine if you could do all of this security and controls in the web browser instead of in the cloud. You wouldn't have expensive cloud infrastructure anymore. You'd don't have this concern about traffic routing and backhauling. It would be much more affordable and perform a lot better. And the browser is already decrypting everything to display for the the user on on their screen. So you don't need man in the middle of decryption like you do in the cloud. So that makes everything a lot simpler and a lot more efficient, and it just works. And you could secure all your apps, all your data, and your workers wherever they go with just one app managed from one console. So that's exactly what we've done. With Sophos workspace protection, we built an endpoint centric solution that's built around a new browser product rather than a cloud delivered solution with all those drawbacks. So let me start on the right side, bit counterintuitive, but look look on the right side, and that's where you'll see the list of what's included with workspace protection or Sophos workspace protection. You get Sophos protected browser, which is the centerpiece of the solution. And that is a product we developed in partnership with Island or island.io as you may know them. And so it comes as a battle hard and mature product. And then we've integrated our ZTNA solution, DNS protection for endpoints, and email monitoring into a very aggressively priced suite that delivers a ton of value and opens up a variety of new use cases. And so what does that mean? Let's look on the left side. Well, they get everything they need to secure their apps and the access to them, whether they're hosting the apps, they're using SaaS apps, or they're using web apps. They get, of course, our zero trust network access solution, and now it's integrated into the browser. They get full control over the SaaS applications that can be accessed. And everyone is protected from malicious or unwanted websites. And this com and when you combine this DNS protection, the browser and the SaaS app controls, you can actually eliminate shadow IT or the use of non sanctioned apps that the company doesn't want their data potentially being leaked onto. And you can even use it to help an organization safely adopt a generative AI and have controls over it and block some of the AI tools that they may not wanna use. And this is all built, as I said, around this new Sophos protected browser, which is a hardened Chrome browser. So it's transparent and familiar to users. It's hardened against attacks and exploits, and it has some great built in data protection controls so that organizations working with sensitive data can ensure it can't accidentally be copy and pasted out of the browser or into the browser, uploaded or downloaded or otherwise shared in a way that would cause a costly data mistake. And customers get added insights into what's going on. What apps are users using? Are they using apps they shouldn't? And, of course, they also get, insights into phishing attacks with the email monitoring system. Of course, all of this is managed from Sophos Central and delivered or deployed from our Sophos Central Cloud. And it works perfectly with the rest of the Sophos portfolio, including Sophos Endpoint and Sophos Firewall, including support for synchronized security heartbeat. So what does all this mean for you? Well, as a new product offering, this solution unlocks a new revenue stream for you. Most customers will have gaps in their protection in this area as I mentioned. Nobody in our market has adopted SASE or SSE yet. And so we come to them with a much more compelling solution and a much more attractive price, and it should be an easy win for you in greenfield opportunities out there. It's a great way for you to deliver something unique. Nobody else is doing this, and it's very competitively priced. Workspace also gives you a way to seamlessly insert those hot topic use cases that come up like generative AI and shadow IT into your conversations. It allows you to demonstrate real value add for your customers, helping them to address the challenges they're likely facing these days with an elegant, affordable solution. It's a great way to expand your existing endpoint firewall business as well because it works best with those products. And it really demonstrates another reason why our products work better together with synchronized security. So in summary, what can you do? It's a very innovative, very excellent solution that will open a lot of doors for you and add new value for your existing customers. Let's face it. Remote and hybrid work is here to stay, and now you can provide a way to make it secure and easy for your customers. So set yourself up for success. Check out the partner blog post that you'll find on partner news. And if you missed last week's partner academy webcast, on the partner portal, go to the events section and you'll find a recording that you can check out. And then join the DNS protection and the new Sophos protected browser early access program to try out the new capabilities yourself. And if you have a valid opportunity between now and the general availability at the February, reach out to your Sophos channel account manager. They can do a quote for you already. And we've already planned the launch of this, and you've you've probably seen some information, but please go check it out, partner news, partner portal, and participate in the early access program so that we can all hit the ground running when this launches on February 26. Okay. Quickly, since we're running short on time, I'm I'm going to cover what's new with Sophos firewall version 22 as well. So there's key three key themes to this release, Secure by design or making the product hardened and more, less easy of a target for attackers. We wanna make our products super secure so that they aren't targeted by attackers, and that's exactly what secure by design is all about. There's also new features to help with network scalability and, performance, especially in larger campus style deployments. And then as with every software firewall release, the team has done a great job in taking your feedback and continuously looks for ways to use that and optimize day to day management. And so you'll find some great performance enhancements, particularly in the management console and some other areas that you've probably been requesting are in Sophos firewall version 22. I'm not gonna go through this slide in detail. It would take us, the rest of the afternoon for you guys. But what I want to, to do is highlight a couple of things. So I will go into the firewall health check-in a moment, but note that there is a brand new Sophos next gen architecture built into this firewall. It's our next gen extreme architecture, and it really positions the firewall perfectly for future security, performance, and scalability enhancements. And it is an a key part of our secure by design theme to this release. So let's look at the health check. This is the highlight feature, in my opinion, of Sophos firewall version 22, and it's part of that secure by design theme I mentioned. What it does is it makes it much easier to evaluate and address any misconfiguration of the firewall. So this new health check feature is constantly evaluating dozens of different configuration settings across all areas of the firewall automatically and compares them with what should be ideal according to CIS benchmarks and other best practices and provides immediate insights into areas that may be at risk and need to be properly configured. So it makes this super easy, makes it great for you as an opportunity for you to go meet with your customers or do a remote meeting and walk them through their configuration and see how healthy their firewall configuration is and walk them through how to fix it. You can drill down into the area that needs addressing right from the, report screen and address it for them on the fly. So it's a fabulous new feature and a great opportunity for you. And this release really enhances all of your sales plays. It'll help you generate new business with, some very competitive, compelling new features, especially with the secure by design. Our competitors have been having a rough period lately dealing with vulnerabilities and being hacked and attacked. So if secure by design is top of mind for our customers. And then it'll help you improve customer retention because they're gonna want the best secure firewall they can get, and it offers an attractive upgrade path for our SG customers who are coming end of life very soon. So, make sure you're converting all of those, legacy SGUTM customers over to Sophos firewall. Alright. That's it for me. I'll turn it back to our lovely host. Thanks, Chris. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate that. To our partners and distributors, thank you for staying with us and going through these updates on the Workspace Protection. What an amazing opportunity for you, our partners, especially those that have been selling endpoints and firewalls over the last many years. You have a great upsell opportunity there as well, particularly with Workspace Protection. And then the new features in firewall 22, as Chris mentioned. Lots of enablement coming. We've been doing that with the teams across APJ as well. Now before we close, firstly, just want to remind our partners some of the updates that we have shared today. Get ready for our FY '27. We are fast approaching the new financial year, but still work to do over the next two months. We have new products and services that we have been announcing and launching. Please look out for those updates, the new product briefs, the enablement, the training, and the certifications. Today, we haven't spoken a lot about our advisory services, but that bouquet and service offering continues to grow, and we are seeing a lot of really healthy pipeline being developed around penetration testing and other advisory services as we support our partners and our customers. We've announced the new SPIFFs and the rewards platform for many partners. You have the option to opt in, and that's just a reminder, please go and visit the partner portal and select to opt in on those reward programs. That is activated and available today. Lots of new certification coming. Remember, the certification and training points, both for sales and architect certs count towards your partner tier status, and you'll be able to track that through the new partner portal page. And then finally, Chanel mentioned it, but I just wanted to flag that a bit further and remind our partners, we will be initiating a Sophos First marketing circle webinar across APJ. You're invited. It's gonna have a digital first focus of how you can amplify your brand working with Sophos as a cybersecurity leader. So look out for that, please. I'm gonna jump ahead and close off, and we're gonna move to questions. I can see there's a few questions in the q and a section already. A reminder, which we shared right at the start, partners, we have our survey available. We welcome your feedback. In fact, we see feedback from our partners and customers as a gift, and we take it very seriously, and we really appreciate any feedback you you would like to share. So please have a look, click on the QR code, and send us any feedback you may have. Now time to ask the experts. And Chris, Shaunell, thank you so much for the updates today. Appreciate that in each of your domains. We've got a few questions that have come through. I'm going to jump to the Q and A panel. I'm going to start with Vikas, who had a question for us around deal registration. And I'll just read that out, and then we can run through a few other few other questions. I did notice, Chris, there might be a question there from Derek around workspace protection, so we'll get to that next. One of the questions coming through from Vikas around deal registration. Unable to see all the sales stages once the deal registration has been submitted. You can only see the options to open, in progress, or lost. My advice on that, Vikas, is we'll put a note in here to our partner care team. You can email them directly. Just ask them to activate the features for you on your deal registration. If it's already been approved, that's likely just looking for a progress update, and it might unlock some further stages for you. So thanks for the question, Vikas, and let's make sure we get you the latest deal registration guide for you and your teams in case there's some extra information there. Chris, we might come to you, the question from Derek. Workspace protection features looking good. The question from this partner is, is this to consider a cheaper alternative to Sophos MDI Essentials? Yeah. I saw that. It's a interesting question because I would consider Sophos workspace protection to be a complement to Sophos MDR essentials, not an alternative to. The reason I say that is because MDR essentials is about having Sophos monitor and do threat hunting for the customer to ensure that they're if they are being attacked, that someone's, remediating that immediately. And workspace protection is more of a preventive product to help avoid being attacked or or, getting into a a situation where they need some remediation in the first place. So they are complementary, not alternatives. Appreciate that, Chris. Yeah. Look, thank you for the clarity. There's a follow-up question from Bahrani about workspace protection. Is this an email monitoring? Does this supplement central and email protection? Yeah. Good question. If you're not familiar with email monitoring system, that's a product we recently launched that's standalone as well that is designed for customers who don't have Sophos email, managed from Sophos Central. So if they're using some other competitor's email solution and they want some added insights into potential phishing attacks, then this is the perfect addition for them. And it's a good stepping stone, hopefully, to get them onto Sophos email protection because they'll see the value that it adds, and they'll want to switch vendors for their email protection, hopefully. So it is it's it's a good addition to the portfolio, and it is not for existing Sophos email customers. They're already taken care of. Appreciate that. Thank you, Chris. I'm just going to go back to the question panel. There's a question that we have here related to I just want to bring that up for us. This is related to the partner portal, Chris. I'll pick this one up. Partner portal, our proposal generator, and there's a question here around updating that with new logo, and can we also add some more features into that? So, Arani, thank you for the question. We'll take that offline and talk to our teams that build the the tools that plug into the proposal generator and share some of that feedback. So I appreciate that. I can't confirm if we can do it, but we'll definitely look into that. So I appreciate the question there. George, we got a question here from George. So let's see. A notice, a new requirement on the partner portal compliance MDR onboarding. So this is a training question related to certification. There is a new MDR onboarding essentials basic training. It's a part of the sales professional training. Have a look at that as well. And then just there's a further follow-up question from George on. If if this is certification name, only one close is e t 18. So I think there's a bit of a technical feature comment on either the certification or training name that we'll need to look into. So, George, thank you for that feedback as well. Now there was one closing question here from Michael, and I just want to make sure we get this right. Is DMARC part of the email offering? Chris, any idea on that? Chris might have gone off the main page. So, we might ask you, see if you're still around, Yeah. come back. There we go. I'm. on the stage with that. Sorry, Chris. Back to you. Since I'm in Canada, I guess the connection is a little dicey. Anyway, the answer to that question is DMARC is part of Sophos email protection. It is not part of the email monitoring system that's included with workspace protection. Appreciate that. Thank you, Chris. Amazing. All right. Let me just see if we've got anything else coming through on the Q and As. I think we are good. So thank you to our partners and our distributors for joining us this afternoon. A quick reminder, we have recorded today's session, so we will be sharing the slides, the recordings with you. Any questions that we've not got to today, we will endeavor to respond to through the follow-up email and also directly with yourself. I see there might be one or two other questions coming in here, thanks for the clarification, and then the opt in option on promotions, which we'll come back to you, JD. There's a separate question coming through on promotions. So thank you all. Chanel and Chris, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing updates with our APJ partners and distributors. With that, we'll bring this to a close, and thank you until we do the next quarterly update. Good luck with the rest of the quarter, everyone. Thank you for your time.