Dominic O’Hanlon (Rhipe)
Rhipe is pressing ahead with plans to build out cloud security capabilities via the partner ecosystem following a new specialist distribution agreement with Fortinet, spanning Southeast Asia, Hong Kong and Korea.
Terms of the agreement will see the expert Microsoft distributor -- set to be acquired by Crayon in a A$408 million deal -- deliver cloud-based subscription services in eight countries across the region. In turn, the Australian-based business will gain access to a portfolio of solutions which includes firewalls, anti-virus protection, intrusion prevention systems and endpoint security components.
“Fortinet has been a driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and convergence of networking and security for over 20 years,” said Dominic O’Hanlon, CEO of Rhipe. Their portfolio of cyber security solutions offers users the most efficient operations, as they are built from the ground up with integration and automation in mind.”
According to IDC, spending on security hardware, services and software across Asia Pacific is expected to reach US$23.1 billion in 2021, representing an increase of 12.6 per cent over the previous year.
As reported by Channel Asia, investment on security related products and services are forecast to grow at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.3 per cent over the forecast period -- from 2019 to 2024 -- and reach US$35 billion by 2024.
A combination of factors is driving the growth, including increased cloud adoption, unprecedented work from home migration and transformation projects by enterprises to overcome operational challenges.
“2020 defined the importance of digital for everyone globally, but it also highlighted shortcomings in security strategies,” noted Simon Piff, research vice president at IDC. “While leading organisations are starting to adopt a more platform-based approach, the majority are still buying point-solutions to address specific concerns. This majority needs to change their mindset and invest more strategically into their security architectures.”
Perhaps of most interest to partners, services will be both the largest and the fastest growing category among security markets, accounting for almost half of security spending throughout the forecast period, with an expected 13.4 per cent five-year CAGR.
“As one of the largest Microsoft CSP / SPLA distributors in Asia Pacific, Rhipe will extend Fortinet cloud offerings to their established and extensive network of born-in-the-cloud partners and managed services providers [MSPs] to accelerate the adoption of management-as-a-service and security-as-a-service,” added Peerapong Jongvibool, senior regional sales director of Southeast Asia and Hong Kong at Fortinet.
In addition to Fortinet, Rhipe has recently also on-boarded vendors such as Zoom, Access4, Runecast, Octopus Cloud and Nerdio.
