Reaching Beyond Multi-tenant Email Security
Email is still the No. 1 threat vector. For MSPs, however, the bigger challenge isn’t detection. It’s scale.
Managing hundreds of cloud email tenants can turn even simple changes into repetitive, time-consuming work. And as vendors move deeper into SaaS delivery models, some partners say support has shifted from technical expertise to product navigation.
Vircom has seen that shift firsthand. The Canadian advanced email security provider began as an email vendor, then later partnered with Proofpoint and others. Along the way, its team built internal monitoring and automation tools to manage cloud environments more efficiently. Those same tools now form the backbone of its MSP strategy.
At ChannelPro DEFEND Orlando, Vircom CEO Nadav Shenker discussed automation, trust, and why multi-tenant access alone isn’t enough for MSPs.
What follows are his responses, edited for brevity.
How Did Vircom’s Evolution Shape Your MSP Strategy?
Shenker: Historically, when we had our own product, we worked with a lot of direct customers and resellers. When we shifted to working with other people’s products, we found that you don’t have total control when it’s not your own product. We were moving a lot of our customers onto the cloud product, and managing it was cumbersome. So, we built a lot of tools for our own team around monitoring and automation. What we found over the last several years is that’s exactly what the MSPs wanted.
What Makes Your Automation Approach Different From Other Multi-tenant Platforms?
Shenker: We’re offering MSPs all those same monitoring, automation and remediation tools that we built for ourselves. A lot of these cloud products call themselves multi-tenanted because you can log in one time and see all your clients. But if you want to make a change to all of them, and you’ve got hundreds of clients, you’ve got to go to dozens or hundreds of tenants and make that change to each tenant.
We have the automation. You come to our portal, you make the change once, we propagate it to all of the clients, rollup reporting, all that fun stuff that we initially built for ourselves. And then we found the MSP community had a need for it. That’s one of the things that makes us different. A lot of those tools that we built, we make available to partners. We don’t charge anything extra for it either. We just charge the same licensing fee that you would pay for these cloud products. Then we focus on adding value through expert technical support, personalized enablement, and all of these exclusive tools that we built for ourselves but we make available to partners.
You’ve Mentioned Trust. How Does Technical Depth Factor Into That?
Shenker: Absolutely. When it comes to trust, MSPs want to work with people who know their products and the technology space better than the MSP does. We have people who have been with the company for decades who have seen email evolve since before it really was email. When our MSP partners call us for help, we know that they’ve already followed all the steps in the knowledge base. They’ve already done the basic troubleshooting. Then, we have them speak to experts that actually understand the product and the technology behind it. That builds the trust factor because they can relate to us.
Nadav Shenker presents at ChannelPro DEFEND: Orlando
Has the Shift to SaaS Changed How Vendors Approach Support?
Shenker: A lot of the time, this shift to the cloud has been great for a lot of things. One of the interesting things we’ve seen is a lot of the tech support has really shifted to product support.
It’s an optimization that vendors have done because back in the old days, when everything was on-premises in customers’ environments, to provide good technical support, you had to inherently understand how the technology works because you’re in different environments. They’re going to have different web filters, firewalls, networking setups, etc. You had to understand how all that plays together because it will impact your product.
With a cloud product or a SaaS product, the vendor owns the tech stack that the product sits in. So their technical support really only needs to be product-level support. A lot of our team comes from the days when we were providing off-premises email security, and so they understand the actual technology, not just the product.
What Excites You Most About the MSP Market Right Now?
Shenker: There’s always exciting things going on. One of the biggest things was with Proofpoint. It really focuses on the enterprise space and has had this Proofpoint Essentials product for many years. We worked with Proofpoint over the last 10 years to make it even better. But ultimately, that product is now being merged after Proofpoint’s acquisition of Hornetsecurity.
Proofpoint just made a huge bet on the MSP community with this acquisition. Until now, all of its big bets were enterprise-focused. Now, it is really focusing on the MSP community. Proofpoint CEO Sumit Dhawan has said that the company wants to grow to $5 billion ARR by 2030, and it has three pillars to get there. The MSP and SMB market is one of those three pillars. We’ve never heard Proofpoint talk about the MSP community at the executive level. We’ve never seen it really invest into the MSP community, so we’re really excited about how the integration of those two platforms will benefit partners and benefit customers.
What Is Vircom Building Next to Support Partners?
Shenker: What we’re working on right now is not even related to any of the products we sell. It’s a prospecting tool for MSPs. The cool thing about this is these AI tools like Cursor and Cloud Code enable people to be creative in ways that they otherwise don’t have the time for. Even if you have the technical ability and the skills to do things, you’re so busy in your day-to-day work. This prospecting tool actually came out of a side project that somebody on our development team started working on.
We played with Cursor and it turned into something that we then showed to some MSPs. It got great feedback. We have decided to take it further and turn it into something that MSPs could use. It will allow MSPs to look for issues with illicit domains, find lookalike customers, and then find talk tracks programmatically in the portal that they can use to reach out to these customers. This was a cool little side project that turned into something that we can take to market and give to MSPs as something that will help them.
Anjali Fluker is managing editor for The ChannelPro Network, where she covers news, trends, and best practices for the MSP community. She specializes in telling the stories that matter to IT providers serving the SMB market. When she’s not reporting on the latest in managed services, she’s connecting with channel pros at industry events across the country.
Images: AI generated by Copilot, Anjali Fluker/ChannelPro
