Shane Grennan is a Channel Director for the Middle East for Fortinet, which is a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions. He talks about his current job role and how Fortinet works with channel partners.
Describe your current job role and the parts that are somewhat challenging?
In my role as Channel Director, I am responsible for transforming the enterprise and alliances partner ecosystem at Fortinet Middle East, to support the company milestones in the region for the next five years. This year the greatest challenge has been taking up a new role without being able to travel to meet members of my team and Fortinet partners outside the UAE.
Can you explain how your company works with channel partners?
As a channel-driven company, Fortinet works with partners to achieve scale in the market and to help service our many customers on an on-going basis. We have a very close working relationship with our partners, based on trust, respect and mutually agreed success.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
By working closely with our partners, engaging together early on projects and focusing on customer value, we ensure our valued partner community continues to grow their Fortinet joint business, in a profitable manner.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
Our partners have done an amazing job figuring out how to continue to service customers while being mostly remote. Now that is done and we are back on the dominant trend of how do partners help customers most forward securely in their digital journey and thus stay high on the value stack. Moving forward securely means public cloud adoption, secure SD-WAN for WAN transformation, security operations automation, AI and, for many customers, OT/IT integration.
What is your management philosophy?
Everyone wants to be a contributing member of a winning team on a mission; I focus on creating that. I lead first and manage where needed. My role is to create a culture and environment where people will consistently strive to go further and deliver excellence.
When you look back at your career what has been the most memorable achievement?
That is a very hard question, but I think one that stands out is bringing the Fortinet name to the Irish market back in 2009 and, in a matter or years, building it to be one of the largest network security vendors in the market, then handing that over to a new team to continue the journey. I used that experience of what is possible to resize my own horizons of possibility and also what was possible for Fortinet elsewhere.
What made you think of a career in technology?
I wanted to be in engineer when in school and after studying engineering in university I was lucky enough to join IBM and I was hooked on networking and later security.
What do you think will be the hot technology talking point of 2021?
Thanks to the fragmenting perimeter and huge rise in data and alerting, customers have a strong need for automation and scale that is not possible without newer solutions, whether that be EDR, SIEM, SOAR or AI. These are well-established trends, but I believe they will hit broader adoption in 2021.
What are your personal interests and where do you like to spend most of your time after work?
The best balance to work is time with family and friends, exercise, reading and enjoying all the great things about living in Dubai.