I got the chance to go over to the Sophos Partner Experience in London a few weeks ago, and what a day it was! Of everything covered, three things matter most for partners in Ireland. Here they are – and here’s how Climb is set up to help you act on each one:

1. CISO Advantage is the announcement to plan around

Sophos walked us through CISO Advantage, the service built from its Arco Cyber acquisition in February. MSP general availability is October. The pitch is simple: there are roughly 35,000 CISOs in the world serving 359 million businesses. Most Irish SMBs are never going to hire one. CISO Advantage gives MSPs a way to sell governance, compliance, and strategic risk advice as a service – agentic AI plus human expertise, packaged for partner delivery. 

Get in touch before October and I’ll sit down with you – in person or on a call – and we’ll go through how Sophos is packaging CISO Advantage, what it’ll cost, the partner margin, and how to position it with your existing SMB customers. For partners already on the Skyward Project or in the AI Academy, you’ve got a head start on the AI-and-security side of that customer conversation.

2. The MDR portfolio is finally getting simpler

From Q3, Sophos will collapse Sophos Central MDR and Taegis into one portfolio. Two tiers – MDR and MDR Plus – on a single stack, with focused add-ons for Managed Risk, NG-SIEM, ITDR and NDR. The dual-platform conversation goes away. One product, one pitch, one upgrade path. The key difference between tiers: MDR Plus comes with the financial breach warranty, and the incident response retainer built in. On standard MDR, both of those are separate. 

3. The Microsoft margin story is the one to take into customer meetings tomorrow

Microsoft commercial revenue is up 365% over the last decade. Partner margin on Microsoft products has fallen to around 2%. Sophos’s pitch is that every customer running Microsoft 365 or Azure needs more security than Microsoft includes by default, and selling Sophos alongside it gives partners a higher-margin product to attach to a low-margin licence. If Microsoft resale is a significant slice of your revenue, this is the conversation that puts margin back into those deals.

Where to start

Climb distributes the full Sophos portfolio in Ireland – MDR, endpoint, firewall, email, and cloud – and we’re the only authorised Irish distributor of the Sophos Threat Profile Assessment*. The Threat Profile flags exposed credentials, suspicious domains, dark web exposure, and internet-facing vulnerabilities in a prospect’s environment. We help partners position it with target customers, run the assessment, and work through the findings together so the conversation moves forward.

We also have our upcoming Climb Connect Dublin event taking place this June, and with Sophos as our lead sponsor it’s going to be one you won’t want to miss so get booked in now.

*In order to run a Sophos Threat Profile Assessment with your target customers, there must be a minimum of 100 seats