Thales eSecurity and Kite Distribution Ltd have joined forces in the battle against cybercrime.
Kite Distribution are a UK focused, value-added distributor that specialises in bringing innovative and disruptive technologies to the UK channel. Their management team have over 50 years of accumulated channel experience, including launching and building markets for some of the most readily recognisable security & networking brands around today.
Thales eSecurity is a leader in advanced data security solutions & services, delivering trust wherever information is created, shared or stored, without sacrificing business agility. Thales provides everything an organisation needs to protect & manage its data, identities and intellectual property & meet regulatory compliance – through encryption, advanced key management, tokenization & much more.
We interviewed Dave Marshall, Director at Kite Distribution Ltd & Jamie Garner, Senior Channel Sales Manager – UK&I at Thales eSecurity, to understand more about this partnership and explain why they have joined together.
Q&A
Q1.) Why have you chosen to partner with Thales eSecurity and why now?’
Dave Marshall: “We are very excited to work with one of the largest security vendors in the world, who have over 40 years of expertise in the security industry. We are in a great position to work with such an established organisation and introduce them to our channel partners. Our focus with Thales eSecurity is to grow their channel for their data protections solutions, particularly the Vormetric Encryption and nShield general purpose HSM’s”.
“Data has become the new currency for many organisations and all cyber criminals. Customers are able to access data anywhere, using different devices, applications and platforms, moving more and more to the cloud. We find that businesses don’t often know where all their sensitive data is and how to classify what is critical. Organisations can invest in discovering all their data, but this is expensive and time consuming. Thales eSecurity’s Vormetric Transparent Encryption enables scalable encryption across all your environments, no matter where your data resides. For peace of mind and to stop those sleepless nights, Thales recommend you encrypt everything.”
Q2.) Jamie, why did you choose to sign with Kite Distribution?’
“As part of our 2018 channel business plan it was always the aim to bring on a second distributor in the UK who could make a difference. Kite Distribution’s business plan was clear and concise which was what we were looking for. The plan was angled towards our mutual ambition which is ultimately expanding and enabling our channel and ultimately driving business growth. Impressively, commercial and technical resources had already been put in place. Above all the Kite Distribution office has a real family feel about the place and they’re all in it to chip in and succeed.”
Q3.) What are the plans for the channel and the future?’
Dave Marshall: “We aim to recruit a limited number of data focused partners who have customers with critically sensitive data i.e. governments, blue light, legal, banking, finance etc. Microsoft partners are a great fit as Thales eSecurity’s Vormetric Transparent Encryption increases adoption of Azure cloud customers, by reassuring that all the data is encrypted in the cloud, so they don’t need to rely on the security of a third-party cloud computing platform to protect all their critical data.”
“We recently launched our partnership with Thales eSecurity at our annual Kite Partner Symposium, which was held on the 11th October, on board the Elizabethan on the River Thames, London, which proved to be a great success. The event provides our vendors with the opportunity to network with partners and present their products. The partnership with Thales eSecurity proved to be a popular topic of conversation.”
Jamie Garner “The Thales eSecurity growth in the UK has predominantly been around our Vormetric solutions. Our vision, of ensuring all of our customer’s data no matter where it resides is secure. With Kite Distribution’s focus and enthusiasm around promoting our solutions to their channel we are confident we can achieve our mutual goals.”
Q4.) What do you think the value to Kite partners is?’
Jamie Garner “I myself spent many years working for large and small distributors and recognise the strengths and weaknesses of both. Thales eSecurity requires a mixture of both and there is plenty of room for two very different distributors in our channel within the UK&I. Kite Distribution will bring the much-needed focus and flexibility for our new breed of resellers/SIs/MSPs/CSPs who already do business around multi cloud environments of which we have already identified will bring us our growth in 2019. Kite Distribution will be pivotal in finding, educating, growing and technically supporting these partners and being an all-round extension to our commercial and technical teams at Thales e-Security. I am very excited about the future of our partnership.”
Dave Marshall, “Vormetric Transparent Encryption is a unique solution partners can take to their customers.”
“As I mentioned previously, there is a huge opportunity for Microsoft Azure but also AWS, Salesforce and SAP partners. Thales eSecurity are seeing security as an enabler for these solutions as well as increasing adoption within existing customers.”
“Once partners get a foot in the door with their first Thales eSecurity deal, there is a great opportunity to expand. Many customers start with one of the encryption products and soon use Thales eSecurity for all their encryption and data security needs.”
“Partners can help their customers with critically sensitive data, meet stringent compliance requirements for encryption and access control with Vormetric Transparent Encryption, including PCI and GDPR.”
“As we are only aiming for a limited number of focused partners, each partner will get a lot of resource and support from Kite and Thales eSecurity, enabling them to start developing opportunities and pipeline quickly.”
If you want to find out more information on Thales eSecurity or Kite Distribution then click below.
