Avanet is now a Sophos Platinum Partner

After three years, we’ve finally reached the very top of the podium. How did we get here? Let’s turn back the clock and walk through the key milestones from our diary. Yes, we keep a diary - we just call it a “timeline” because it sounds cooler. 🙂

Our story

2012

Our professional adventure began on 12.12.2012 with the founding of Avanet GmbH. Since then, we have transformed our GmbH into an AG.

2013

We delivered our first projects using the Sophos UTM, which soon led to a meeting with the partner manager at our distributor at the time (Dieter). Dieter, who now works directly for Sophos, noticed us back when we were still a “nobody” in the Sophos ecosystem. He took the time to explain the Sophos partner programme to us in detail. It turned out that, thanks to our existing Astaro expertise and associated certifications, we already met the requirements for “Sophos Silver status”. Back then, “Silver” was still the lowest tier (today: Authorised), and the only remaining hurdle was to submit the relevant web form. Without Dieter, though, who ignited our enthusiasm and showed us what we could achieve with Sophos, we probably wouldn’t have registered so quickly.

@Dieter: Many thanks!

2014

We were handling more and more projects and decided to make security a core part of Avanet. Previously, we had always treated it as an add‑on product after deploying an IT environment. The Sophos Firewall allowed us to equip the workplace environments we set up with VPN and wireless - and of course to meet the growing demand for working from home.

From that point on, anyone interested in a Sophos product became a potential customer. To reach them, we came up with the idea of publishing the most important Sophos products on our website, with concise but solid product descriptions including prices, designed as a purchase form. We called this early, heavily simplified version of what later became our Sophos shop Shop v1. We ranked well on Google for the keyword “Sophos”. At the time there were what felt like 300 million other online shops, but none of them sold Sophos products. It was actually difficult to find any public pricing at all for a Sophos product. You could say we were pioneers in this space.

After a few weeks, we had so many enquiries that we had to optimise our setup, as the administrative overhead was becoming too high. So we went back to the drawing board, identified what needed to change, and worked on Shop v2. This time, it really felt like a proper online shop. For the first time, customers in Switzerland had a place on the internet where they could order Sophos hardware and licences. We also offered a flat‑fee basic firewall configuration.

However, we didn’t want to be pigeonholed as “just an online shop”, so we invested a lot of time in deepening our Sophos expertise and had our knowledge validated through additional Sophos certifications. After all, we were also a Sophos service provider and wanted to be able to support our customers whenever issues arose.

2015

All the time we had poured into Shop v2 paid off. More and more people interested in Sophos found us online, and order volumes continued to grow. Up to that point, we had never really thought about what could happen; we simply responded to the market and did what felt right.

Eventually, when we once again found ourselves overwhelmed by the admin load, it became clear that Shop v2 also had to be taken offline. We were increasingly running out of time to dive into interesting projects or try out new Sophos features. What we needed now was a proper shop that could automate much of the workflow, without us having to manually check a hundred things for every single order.

And so, after three months of planning and implementation, Shop v3 went live - and it is still running smoothly today. Compared to its predecessor, the third version offered even more information, videos, payment methods, and new products and services.

Around that time, we also began to use our blog more actively, writing posts about new products, updates and features, and linking those articles directly from the product pages. We still owe a lot to this shop, as it is largely responsible for new Sophos engagements.

As a small two‑person outfit experiencing strong growth, we also came onto Sophos’s radar. Dieter then introduced us to Quentin, now our account manager at Sophos. He took us under his wing and made us a Sophos Gold Partner… yes, really! We could hardly believe it ourselves.

We were happy. We were doing what we love and could make a living from it. What more could we want? We had no idea what was still to come…

2016

2016, in a nutshell, was an absolutely insane year. Thanks to Quentin, we were invited for the first time to the Sophos Partner Conference in Cannes.

@Quentin: Many thanks!

We will never forget those three days - and if we do, there are hundreds of photos to remind us. We were as shy as fawns, finally emerging from our office back into bright sunlight and down to the sea. It was a major Sophos event, and we even found ourselves in a meeting at the table with key Sophos people, such as Karl‑Heinz Warum, who is responsible for 93 countries at Sophos.

By then, the firewalls we deployed and configured were protecting organisations with slightly more than 2,500 users. Not that we doubted our skills, but it still felt pretty good that such large companies trusted a two‑person business.

But there was more. We became the first Sophos Synchronized Security partner in Switzerland, and at the security trade fair in Nuremberg (it‑sa) we met Michael Gutsch. He plays an incredibly important role in our current project, which we’ll be presenting to the public soon. Work on this project started in December 2016. As our online shop was running very successfully, there was no reason to tear it all down and build a fourth version. No - with all the knowledge and experience we had accumulated over the last few years, we wanted to create something completely new.

2017

And here we are now, in 2017. Respect to everyone who’s read this far. It’s great to know someone is actually interested in our story. ;-)

You can read in detail what has already happened this year in various blog posts. In February, we switched from GmbH to AG; in April we went on a trip with Quentin to the Sophos Germany headquarters and met the people who work on the products we deploy. In May we were once again invited to the Sophos Partner Conference, which took place in Lisbon this year. We’ve summarised all our impressions of the Discover Conference and Sophos’s vision for this year in a separate blog post: Sophos Discover Conference 2017 - What Sophos is planning for the future

Beyond that, we’re continuing to work on great customer projects and, of course, on our internal project (codename: Optimus Prime). That effort also gave rise to “Lena”, whom we’ll introduce to you in due course.

But now we come to the real reason you started reading this article. On 29 March 2017, Quentin informed us that we are now officially a Sophos Platinum Partner.

We are No. 7

With a little over 1,200 Sophos partners in Switzerland, making it into the top 7 within four years feels incredible to us - and it shows we must have done a few things right along the way.

We find it pretty mind‑blowing when we compare ourselves to the other Sophos Platinum Partners. We are now the youngest by a margin of 20 years, and the smallest by six employees, of all Platinum Partners in Switzerland.

But how do you reach this status?

1. Certifications

To achieve Platinum status, a number of certifications are required. We will leave out the Astaro v6 certifications here, as they date back to before Sophos acquired the firewall vendor. But here is a list of all the certifications we have completed:

• 2014-01-29 - Sophos Certified Engineer - UTM/Network Protection EL30a-DE - Lab Assessment
• 2014-02-08 - Sophos Certified MSP - MSP30a - MSP UTM/Network Protection Overview
• 2014-02-08 - Sophos Certified Engineer - TO30a-DE - Technical Overview - UTM v9
• 2014-02-08 - Sophos Certified Architect - AH30a Part 1 - Certified Architect - UTM
• 2014-02-09 - Sophos Certified Architect - AL30a Part 2 - UTM/Network Protection
• 2014-02-17 - Sophos Certified Engineer - EL20a-DE - Data Protection
• 2014-02-17 - Sophos Certified Engineer - TO20a-DE - Technical Overview - Data Protection
• 2015-07-19 - Certified Engineer - Sophos Cloud
• 2015-07-19 - Certified Engineer - Sophos UTM
• 2016-05-23 - Certified Engineer - Sophos Firewall Beta
• 2016-05-23 - Certified Engineer - Sophos XG Firewall
• 2016-08-09 - Certified Engineer - Sophos Central
• 2016-10-13 - Synchronized Security Specialist - Sophos Central and Sophos XG Firewall Heartbeart
• 2017-02-21 - Certified Architect - Sophos XG Firewall v16.5

We also left the 22 sales certifications out of this list. They are still required, though, because they prove that you actually know Sophos products as well.

The certifications also show where our focus lies. Sophos has a broad portfolio and a wide range of solutions. We concentrate on Sophos UTM (for as long as it continues to be developed), Sophos XG and Sophos Central, which work together via Security Heartbeat.

2. Revenue

Certifications are only one part of what’s required to become a Platinum Partner. The other part, as with any vendor, is revenue. This is where you come in: thanks to the trust you placed in us, we were able to deliver strong numbers - and last year they were good enough for us to qualify as a Platinum Partner.

Admittedly, we only just made it, and we really have to push hard to maintain that status next year. Ultimately, though, it’s just a label that doesn’t fundamentally change the way we work or our philosophy. We are who we are, and what matters far more to us is that we truly understand Sophos’s products and can support our customers at any time. Still, it is undeniably cool to know we’re one of the few in Switzerland who have earned this status.

We would therefore like to take this opportunity to say a huge THANK YOU to all our Sophos customers!

The service that generated this map from postcodes was free of charge and therefore limited to 250 entries. But of course we want to thank every single one of you, including our customers in Germany and Austria who did not make it onto the map for design and cost reasons. 🙂

Shipping costs are being removed from now on!

We spent a long time thinking about what we could give back to you as a thank-you. Since our shop already offers very fair prices, we can hardly turn that wheel any further. What we can abolish with immediate effect, however, is our flat shipping fee within Switzerland. From now on, we offer Free Shipping on all products.

Why are we going to cover shipping costs ourselves from now on? Well, because we can! Since we question everything and optimise our processes at least twice a year, we can not only process enquiries faster, but also offer better prices as a result. We can absorb the CHF 12, and apart from that, we do not actually need that much to live on. 😉

The story continues…

As mentioned, we’ve been working on a new project since December 2016. On 12 July, it will leave the beta phase. More on that in the next blog post.