Pedro Bellucci, Channel Sales Manager at Hillstone Brazil, tells us how Hillstone Networks supports its channel partners in the Latin America market.
What does your position entail?
My mission is to develop the channel ecosystem, empowering and getting close to our partners. This is a critical column of Hillstone Networks’ business growth in Brazil.
Can you explain how your company works with channel partners?
Firstly, we respect our channel partners and that entire ecosystem. We are straight in the way we deal with this ecosystem, working hard to help our partners to grow their business and to be a key partner for its customers. Our distributors are extremely aligned with our objectives.
We share great technology and great business opportunities with our channel partners.
We have a well-defined channel program, with clear rules for our partners.
Participating in the Hillstone Channel Program provides partners with various tools to ensure their cybersecurity projects are led in the best possible way. A key aspect of the Hillstone Channel Program is its focus on training. This training covers current and emerging threats and how to use Hillstone intelligence to help CISOs succeed in combating these threats.
What is your management philosophy?
I understand that the more collaborative the team is, the better the performance. It is about building an environment where everyone feels comfortable to raise their hand and speak. Whether it’s about a process, a person, or a tool, this is crucial. Everyone should be listened to attentively. This is a posture adopted by my leaders, and I want to keep supporting this philosophy. The goal is to reward top performers, encourage newcomers, and support those facing significant challenges in their businesses.
Do you work differently with channel partners in Brazil compared to other regions?
In Brazil, the culture is different, period. We have several extra challenges compared to other regions in the world. And I’m not just talking about tax issues. We also have a need to ‘take the channel by the hand’, offering training programs, developing projects together, and so on. This is critical because Brazil is a market that needs technology and knowledge to be properly developed. Yes, we need strategic partners who already have the strength to secure large projects. But what about the SMB market? We are working hard to spread in all Brazilian regions a solid knowledge base about our solutions, both commercially and technically.
How do your partners deliver Hillstone solutions to end-users?
Many partners are moving towards the MSSP path. Their offerings are based on a layer of services that sustain the digital environment of the customer. In my point of view, this is a natural evolution of cybersecurity solutions. But we also remain strongly focused on licensing and equipment sales. We are flexible, addressing the needs and business models of all kinds of partners, delivering the best technology and knowledge regardless of the path they choose to adopt.
How do you ensure channel partners flourish in a highly competitive market?
Despite being a highly competitive market, there is a lot of unmet market demand in Brazil. We navigate well across several verticals, including Internet Service Providers (ISPs), financial institutions, retail businesses, healthcare organisations, educational players and energy companies. When we talk about major accounts, where we naturally compete with large vendors, we have a different level of technical support to the partner than what is usually found in our market, offered by other vendors.
We support our channels end-to-end in the project, from the PoC (Proof of Concept) to details of the contract signing process. A well-aligned strategy with our distributors guarantees that the entire channel ecosystem will have product availability, various financial solutions to support the customer’s choice, and of course, an unquestionably well-defined pricing positioning.
What are the latest trends you see emerging across the channel?
In terms of portfolio, Hillstone sees a huge growth with its cloud security solutions – that is the case of CloudHive, CloudArmour and CloudEdge. These platforms provide comprehensive workload protection across all environments, from bare metal and virtualised to containerised systems. A change that has been happening for a while but is still prominent in the channel ecosystem is migrating to MSSP models, adding a service layer to Hillstone products and software, from the implementation process to full environment support. Hillstone understands this movement and supports the channel in this journey.
Which regions do you see offering the most opportunities for your company?
We have a lot of business throughout Brazil. Southeast, South, and Midwest are our best performing regions. But we have many projects in the Northern and Northeastern regions of Brazil as well.