Name: Forcepoint Partner Webinar: From AWARE to Action—Accelerate Success in 2026
Uploaded: 2025-12-18T15:46:06.972Z
Duration: 27 min 32 s
Description: Forcepoint Partner Webinar: From AWARE to Action—Accelerate Success in 2026

Transcript for "Forcepoint Partner Webinar: From AWARE to Action—Accelerate Success in 2026": At its core, self aware data security means real context. When the system knows who, where, and why this data is being used, it automatically can adapt to reduce risk. The faster you innovate, the more risk you create, and the more important it becomes to control that risk in real time. And when I hear the term AI risk, the first thing I have to do is really pull it apart. Are we worried about people uploading sensitive data to a chat GPT website? Are we worried about people downloading models from open source software that actually contain malicious packages? Are you securing the interfaces? Are you protecting against common threats like prompt injection? Are are you applying the authentication access controls, both to the data, but also the tool use of these AI systems? It would be much faster for us to have a solution, which is a single pane of glass. Looking at my data leakage prevention, looking at my proxy logs, altogether to identify the behavior of a specific employee. I think it it helps reduce false positives very heavily. If organizations are careful with their data, it will become an enabler and a business differentiator. So you don't need visibility or control. You need visibility and control together to close the gap. This is the future of self aware security Forcepoint it's investing in. Active, intelligent, and adaptive protection that gives organizations the power to use their data fearlessly everywhere it matters. Hello, Forcepoint partners, and welcome to this quarter's, channel partner webinar. We're so happy to have you all here today. We have, Tim Puccio, our VP of global channel sales, and Salah Nasr, VP of product marketing, speaking to you all today. I'm gonna go ahead and just dive right in and kick it off to Tim who is going to take us through some great, excuse me, some great wins for 2026 and give you some updates on what is happening with the team. Well, Tim. Thank you, Brandy. I appreciate that. And thank you to all the partners for taking time to join us today with, you know, thirteen days left in the calendar year and a big quarter to close. I appreciate your dedication and commitment. I wanted to spend a couple minutes and really talk about last year and and this year and what we've accomplished. If I think about one word to describe what's happening, it's momentum. The momentum we're building together, solving customer problems, complex customer problems at that, and delivering solutions is amazing. As you can see, today, we have over three of the top companies or four of the top companies in every major vertical, whether it's financial services, health care, public sector, we fit. Not only are we having success there, we're having success in all markets, commercial, mid market, and enterprise. So I wanna thank each of you for that work. I thought it would be helpful just to give you a snapshot. So on the next three slides, I wanna give you a preview of just a handful of the logos and the companies that together we've won over the last quarter. Just a quick you know, look at the brands, look at the logos, again, across all the major verticals, and I think the partners who worked on these know very well exactly how hard they worked to make sure we were successful. Same thing in The Americas, same thing across Asia Pac and across the globe. Team, your impact is real. It's real. We are seeing absolute quality performance coming from the ecosystem. I will be very transparent. We have a focused set of partners that have chosen to make investments in us, and, like, we're doing the same in return in investing very deeply in programs to support them in building up their businesses. And I hope to see that continue to put sure and us to continue to deepen our relationships with the partners that we engage with. We will exit this year with north of 20% increase in partner contribution and accelerate well beyond the plan we set forth together. Most excitingly, listen, our partners are seeing great success with DSPM, DDR, DLP, web security, our advanced firewall. The the adoption and the growth that we're seeing in each of those areas with our focus partners is paramount to none. And it sets us up. We have an extremely strong pipeline together moving into 2026, and I look forward to getting there with you. So when we started, Greg, you you can oh, actually yeah. Sorry. When we when we walked into 2025, we had some very clear priorities. We we had three, frankly. One was we wanna make sure it was easy to work with us. Two, we wanna make sure we focused on improving profitability. And three, we need to accelerate the road map and deliver quality solutions. So I'm gonna take a second and just talk a little about a bit about each one of these. So as far as accelerating the road map, and and and Salah's gonna get into a lot more detail on this when when he presents. Think about it. Early in in in 2025, we acquired Get Visibility, a leader, the leader in data powered, AI powered data security. Just amazing. What it brought to us was an incredible depth and capability around DSPM and DDR, and it just complements the portfolio and the customers that we support today. In addition to that, I think you all are aware back midyear, we launched the data security cloud, frankly, leveraging the DSPM and d r DDR capabilities to help customers and help you help your customers identify sensitive data, classify it with precision, and reduce that risk in a much faster and more efficient way. Just amazing what's happened and we continue to see it and I expect we'll continue to invest deeply in that portfolio and get better at the things that we're already are winning with. Making it easier, folks, over the last year, I've journey I've traveled around the globe three times meeting with partners, meeting with customers, having conversations about how do we make this more efficient, how do we make it easier for you to win without any heavy load. So we took it internally while you were out winning customers and and winning deals. My teams have done a lot of work. We've we've done, you know, three primary programs. One, most of you are aware we have a partner portal. We have a customer hub. We chose to consolidate those two platforms into one hub that allows not only our customers, but you to access information on a regular basis, you know, partner ready sales content, product updates and price books, easier access to deal reg, customer win stories. Sal is gonna talk to you a little bit at the end about some of the new things that we're doing around, I'm not gonna steal his thunder, but he's gonna give you some playbook things that we're building in product marketing and marketing. Also, you know, I I think you've seen this, we've revamped and expanded in most of our territories and geographies with our channel account management team and couldn't be more excited about what we're seeing from a performance perspective there. Lastly, partner profitability is paramount to everything. Let let's let's all be honest. We're here to make money. We're here to choose which solutions will help us be successful. So we've deliberately spent a lot of time developing deeper relationships with those focused partners who choose to invest with us, and we're choosing to invest more with them. So you'll see, as a result of that, a much more streamlined MDF process going into next year, easier for you to access those funds on a project based, proposal based program to help you accelerate your business and pull us along with you. You know, we we also spend a great deal of time laying the foundation for a new partner program. We will launch a new partner program early, in in q one, and and we'll be releasing it January. You know? And and the program is designed to really meet the objectives that you've all shared with us. Reward loyal loyalty, reward deepness of competency and capabilities and skills, make sure that we have, our our accounting not only for net new business, but retention. You're gonna see a lot of programs coming from us on how do we help you expand the base, how do we help you keep your customers and add incremental capabilities to what they've already leveraged in their environment. So lots of great things to come there. We'll do some, press releases and some information and some training enablement early in January, and start to kinda feed the information. And we'll give you plenty of time to make sure you can meet requirements and you understand the benefits that are available in that program. So with that, what what I'd love to do is is welcome Salah to the stage. Quick introduction. Salah is one of our veterans here, and, you know, he he leads our product marketing team. And I say veteran, I mean veteran industry. He can talk about it a little bit. But, I I asked him if he would share with you how we position data security everywhere, the thought process, and just get into an interactive conversation here. So, Salah, the stage is yours. Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate it. Hello, everyone. Let's go ahead and and and jump into, what we're seeing in the industry. So look, me and my team, we spent a lot of time with customers, with analysts in the industry, and there's really a trend happening worldwide regardless of what region, what vertical of customer we talk to. These are three very consistent pain points we see everywhere. Data sprawl and fragmentation. I can't tell you how many conversations we've had with customers where they may have an existing DLP solution or they maybe maybe have Microsoft purview, or they may have some classification tool. Their biggest pain point is still, we are not confident with the data classification, or we are not sure we know where all our sensitive data is. And that is foundational for them to be able to protect the things such as accidental data loss by employees. If the data is not classified, you're not gonna stop it. Not understanding if an employee is being malicious with data exfiltration, such as downloading to USB, before they depart from the organization or they drop it through SAS, or they might be very tricky and they might encrypt the file and try to upload it or change the language and upload it to a personal, box. Or they might just accidentally or purposefully send it to an AI. And AI is an interesting interesting conversation because there are many use cases there for for us, all of us, even at Forcepoint, when it comes to data security. I am deploying my own LLM in my organization such as a Microsoft Copilot, and I don't want it to have access to my internal financial records or to my HR records. Well, you don't really know that, if you haven't classified that data properly to put correct right guardrails. You want to understand what Salah is doing with with ChatGPT, what kind of prompts am I putting in, what kind of data am I uploading. You need to be able to see that and stop that. Let alone just understand what AI shadow AI is taking place in your organization. Now all three of those things foundationally start with you understanding where your sensitive data is. And these three use cases, again, are clear across every region, absolutely every vertical worldwide. Now we're dealing with this, all of us collectively, in the face of ever increasing regulations and fines backed with those regulations. I know in California, we've had a couple of lawsuits against insurance companies, where they have accidentally or improperly handled their customer's data. So the regulations are increasing. The fines with them are increasing, and so is the scrutiny. And for many, there's a business impact. If not only is there the impact of the fines, but if you can't prove that you are abiding by some of these regulations, most of the most companies will not get approved for cyber security insurance either. So that problem stacks up. Similarly, with state with security controls, there are many startups that are that are claiming to solve AI dramatically differently or or they they have a new hook or a way to scan sensitive data and classify it, or they have a very good hook into cloud so they can they can detect data security anomalies. However, most of these are immature. They're not proven. Or most importantly, the incidents kind of go haywire. Who how do you follow-up? Is it really a conviction of a data loss? Is it a false positive, etcetera? So you have this security stack that is creating more complexity than it is solving solutions. And this is this is another area many people, specifically when it comes to data security, are trying to solve. Next slide, please. The best way to depict the problem is a story. Right? And if you think about a day in life story of of a well meaning sales rep who downloads a CRM report from Salesforce or or whatever CRM application. Right? We're not calling out any particular applications here. Downloads it to the device, uploads it to, a share files, box, SharePoint, Dropbox, whatever it may be. Takes that same file, also uploads it to ChatGPT so they can do what they should be doing using AI to accelerate their day to day tasks, summarize it, come up with with email scripts, come up with action items, and then takes that data and shares it everywhere. What just happened here? Next slide, please. What just happened is an absolute explosion of data across one file, many different channels, different formats, moved out, exfiltrated possibly in three different areas, if not more, all at once. And what this depicts is that you cannot solve for data security by having a best in class endpoint or a best in class cloud or a best in class web gateway or a best in class email security. You need the whole gamut. Data security is a platform level conversation, not a pillar or a channel conversation. Next slide, please. So to approach this, you really need to abide by a security model or a framework, such as the ability to discover, classify, prioritize, remediate, or protect your data. And you not only need to do this in a single point in time, you need to do this continuously. Next slide, please. Right. You need to be able to do this consistently across all channels whether the data is at rest, it's on prem or in the cloud, in motion, right, such as I see, a comment here about, email gateway, In motion, in use, web gateway, email, etcetera, specifically at rest. And I feel like this is where we've I've heard the most complaints is about not only do I know my endpoint and all the all the files that are on it, but I have no idea what's in my servers. I don't know what structured or unstructured data resides. I know I have terabytes of data residing, redundant outdated data most likely. And that had never been a problem until AI came along as an example. Right? Next slide, please. Doing all of this in a single platform really allows organization and this is the big value. Right? If you know what an employee or a contractor that has access to your data or or or or an intern that is touching data through their devices, attempting touch data in SaaS, moving data around between SaaS applications, never touching your web gateway as an example if you heavily rely on a web gateway solution. They're moving east and west between different clouds, between different SaaS applications. You you want to see that behavior, and those are gonna generate thousands of alerts. You don't want to look at all those alerts. You want to look at the behavior of that user that's creating these alerts. And if it's risky behavior, such as I'm in marketing, I'm touching data that happens to be in finance. I don't have access, but you see me attempting a 100 times, That's risky behavior. Or the traditional risky behavior of I submitted my two week resignation. Now I'm trying to download terabytes of data onto a USB drive. That's risky behavior. Right? There are many use cases there. But second you see that, you can only see that risky behavior if you have that platform level view. That way you can convict, hey. This is absolutely risky. And then your risk score skyrockets, and you can do immediate controls around that. You can block. You can disconnect. Right? You can alert all your management. You can do really cool things once you understand a user is being risky. Or you can coach the user. Just alert them. At, uploading sensitive data to chat GPT is a restricted action or it doesn't abide by your company's security policy or or a suggestion to use internal Copilot versus external SaaS. Whatever it may be, you don't always have to be the sledgehammer. You can actually let the user do it, but coach them along. And in in doing so, you're reinforcing your corporate policy, and you're letting them know, hey. We do have visibility of what you're doing here. So fantastic solution there. Next slide. You know, and we have a lot of content and use cases built to really speak to the customer regardless of what they're trying to solve for. And this is just an example of one of the many solutions. I talked about enabling AI. I talked about, insider risk. Next slide, please. One of the we with on top of these, you know, I see a comment about email gateway. If the customer is looking, hey. I need to secure my sensitive data from leaving through email. We absolutely can solve that for you. If you want to focus if you wanted your customer or the the patch of customers you're working with is really big on data governance, we absolutely have a solution for that. Right? Matter of fact, I'd ask go to, forcepoint.com, go to solutions, or products, and under products, you'll see a laundry list of solutions, that that we we support. And we provide these type of one pager solution overviews. And if you go to the next slide, please, Brandy. Or we we can dive a lot deeper to really support some of the sales motions that you might have. Right? There are many very specific go to market solutions that we work with other partners. Some of you on, hey. How do I amplify the sales motion? We're we're really good at, or we focus on, or we want to we want to turn on, such as we might have many Symantec customers in our patch that are that are coming up for renewal. They're not no longer supported by Broadcom. We want to know what to do next. Right? We can help with those kind of type of motions. Everything from the the talking points to the email templates to the targeting specific messaging by industry or by region or by pinpoint. You might have a boatload of customers as many of you do, at Forcepoint that have DLP, but they don't have CASB or they haven't fully extended it or they don't they're still being challenged. They might be using Purview, and they're not happy with that level of classification because I've yet to deal with a customer who has Purview that is happy with that level of classification. Then you want to push DSPM and talk to them about, being able to detect that sensitive data everywhere. Whatever your whatever your, motion is, we absolutely have supporting content. Please reach out to us. You have an army of people here at Forcepoint that are happy to help curate the right kind of content for your for your, market. K? With that, thank you so much for having me today. Tim, Brandy, back to you. Sala, thank you so much for taking the time with us today. Very insightful as far as the things that you're doing in the product and the marketing teams to to support our partner ecosystem. I encourage everybody out there to take a look into the new partner portal, the new partner I'm sorry, the new hub as we release content and start to push this. If there are specific programs or things you're looking for, reach out to us directly. We have complete support from Sala. The momentum you guys have built is incredible. So I wanna thank you and the team immensely for that. Likewise, team, we are actively engaged in programs, events, major events like RSA, our own Aware event, and we'll we'll run another one of those this year, GITEX. Go down the list. Please reach out to us. Get engaged with your channel account manager. Come to us with proactive proposals on how we can help you grow your business and data security and how we can help enable your sales, engineering, and implementation teams to be successful supporting and delivering for your customers. So I I just encourage you to reach out. Lastly Brandon, you can jump forward. Well, actually, not lastly. Just looking into to 2026, just a few of the focus areas. I'll take a minute before we run out of time. On on strategic product led focused areas, so we're gonna continue to push and reemphasize our brand and data security everywhere, our positioning in the market. We know we need to make it easier for you when you walk into your customer and you start talking about one of our solutions, they immediately know what's going on. We've gotta make sure this year together, we secure our existing customer base. We make sure you're successful in cross sell and acceleration. You will see in the new partner program when we launch next year a clear set of incentives and and margin enhancements that we're gonna provide to you for that expansion and cross sell in the partner base. Stay focused, you know, we we are seeing a 100 in Asia Pac alone, over a 140% growth in DSPM and data security, north of a 100 in The Americas and north of a 100 as well as in the EMEA theater. So stay focused on it. We are gonna continue, as as Salas said, on the sales plays. He took you through a handful. I won't spend a lot of time on those here. And then, you know, making sure we get that partner program updated in your hands. We're gonna spend a lot more time this year, as we had many years in the past on enablement and content. So I I believe we owe it to you to make it easier for you to ask access the content and quickly get enabled on the plays, the opportunities, and what we believe. So engage closely with your channel account management team. And then, Brandon, you can go to the last slide. I appreciate everybody, and we certainly appreciate all the work you do every day. Thirteen days left in the year. Couldn't be more exciting to to have a successful close to to 2025. And I wanna wish each of you happy holidays. Hopefully, you get to spend some time with your friends and family. Check back, relax, and let's get back after this in 2026. So thank you all for joining me today.