Falanx Cyber Defence Ltd, part of the Falanx Group Ltd (LON:FLX) Managing Director Rick Flood caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss joining the SolarWinds Technology Alliance Programme, what services they will be offering and what this means for the company.
Q1: Now we saw earlier that Falanx Cyber Defence has joined the SolarWinds Technology Alliance Programme. Rick, can you tell us a little bit more about who SolarWinds are?
A1: For anybody who doesn’t know who SolarWinds are, they are a US-based listed software company, they probably have a market, if you check today, probably in the region north of $6 billion so pretty significant.
They offer a range of technical programmes to enable people to manage their IT infrastructure predominantly, which of course, as we all know, has developed to be not just managing IT but also managing security over the recent sort of years.
Q2: What is the Technology Alliance Programme then?
A2: The Technology Alliance Programme, or TAP as they call it, is specific to one part of the business. When you look at SolarWinds, there are two elements to it, one that they call CORE, which offers software really to the enterprise end of the market, and then there’s the SolarWinds MSP business, which offers, through MSP’s or managed service providers, the ability to service their customers with all of these products I mentioned earlier.
The TAP programme, in itself, is a group of pre-approved partners by SolarWinds who offer services and products that complement their own portfolio and is specifically targeted at the MSP community, through TAP, to enable them to better serve their customers.
Q3: So, what services will you be rolling out to the network?
A3: Well, in fact, it’s pretty much everything that we offer.
So, depending on what people know, we offer a range of services from offensive to the defensive strategies, cyber security on the offensive side, it’s all very ethical as you would expect, but that could be emulating a criminal to try and attack somebody, through to the defensive strategies, which include our recently announced Triarii platform and support not only from that but also specific solutions currently in the SolarWinds portfolios. For example, they’ve got something called SentinalOne EDR, which is an endpoint protection service or solution, we can offer a sub-service behind that. So, everything that we offer will be going through the TAP programme.
The most significant elements or components of this is that this gives us direct access. We’ve been working with SolarWinds for the last couple of years on the security side of their offering, and what the TAP programme enables us to do is to now work directly with all of their community, wherever they are in the world. We’ve previously announced that they’re in the region of 22,000 MSP’s servicing many, many customers, more than that, globally.
Q4: What does all this mean for Falanx then?
A4: As far as we’re concerned, as I say, we’ve been working with SolarWinds for a couple of years and we’ve been using a product of theirs called Threat Monitor. Earlier this year, we decided that we would develop their own additional services, which we’ve previously announced called Triarii, which is an enhancement to the Threat Monitor service.
We’re delighted that SolarWinds have endorsed that by adding it to their portfolio through the TAP programme and in addition, what we should see is an acceleration of the pent up demand that we’ve created over the last two years.
We’ve run a number of events together where we’ve advocated security into the MSP community and, in doing so, we’ve created a lot of demand which we haven’t been able to fulfil from a variety of reasons. This announcement should start to unblock that and already in the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen a significant uptick in inbound interest from their MSP community so we’ve really excited about it.
