Mimecast channel boss outlines strategy

It is just a few months since Mimecast appointed Micheal McCollough as global channel chief, but already the focus is on making life easier and more profitable for partners.

The security player appointed McCollough as senior vice-president of worldwide partners and alliances in July, and he has spent the time since talking to the channel to get a sense of where his priorities should be.

He has been looking at how it can “truly make it easy for our partners to transact [and] engage with us in a more partner-friendly manner”, recognising that in taking an indirect route to market, it needs to support partners to grow the business.

“We work with our product teams, marketing teams [and] operations teams to make sure that, in everything we do, we have the channel in mind,” he said.

The priority has been to identify and then remove roadblocks that slow the speed of business and engagement that partners can generate with the vendor.

McCollough has identified speeding up the quote-to-cash process, activating partners on its portal, how it deals with market development fund claims and deal registration, and supporting distribution as some of the areas that have been given attention over the past few months.

“Making those things easier, leveraging AI [artificial intelligence] capabilities to automate some of those functions so it is easy for the partners to get access to information in a way that can help, that we can drive activities faster,” he said.

McCollough added that the business had been proactively encouraging partners to generate fresh business, but there was also an opportunity for its channel to focus on its installed base.

“One of the things I want to do is look at the programme and make tweaks that would include looking at our renewal business, looking at the install base and providing partners with more support to play a more active role in customer service activities, customer success activities,” he said.

Mimecast has an established base in the small and medium-sized enterprise market, but increasingly its partners are striking deals in larger enterprises, and McCollough said it wants to support partners looking to tap into that market expansion.

“We’ve had amazing run in the SMB and mid-market space. But as we continue to acquire these new capabilities, particularly around the insider threat capabilities and awareness capabilities, that is a very strong enterprise play as well,” he said.

As a result, McCollough said the firm was looking at striking more relationships with systems integrators and enterprise-focused partners.

The final plank of his current strategy is to encourage partners to develop their own services proposition and wrap more value around Mimecast technology.

“We want to make sure we have the ingredients that allow partners to deliver services, either consulting services or managed services,” he said.

McCollough said that for the rest of the year and moving into 2026, the priority would be to make life easier for partners, encouraging renewals, services and recruiting to cover the widening enterprise opportunity.

Speaking at the Canalys Channel Forum, Mimecast CEO Marc van Zadelhoff said the business had made three acquisitions in the two years he had been running the company and was making sure it could equip partners with the technologies needed to protect against a world where AI is being deployed to undermine defences.

He added that the firm took a partner-only approach, and the efforts being made to make life easier for its channel would strengthen that approach.

“It is really all about partners, multi tiers of partnerships, and it is a huge opportunity. We’re growing very nicely. Expanding the US is a big footprint. As I mentioned, we’re headquartered in London [and have] very strong relationships in the UK. And we’ve been aggressively expanding through partnerships all the way down to South Africa and over into the Middle East, into continental Europe,” he said.