2015 – 2018
FireEye, McAfee and Ixia
A portfolio of security and test-and-measurement vendors, carried into the Brazilian channel through value-added distribution.
A different kind of relationship from the rest of this list. For several years the work sat on the distribution side of the market, carrying vendors' technology into the Brazilian channel as a value-added distribution engineer, rather than working for any one of them directly. Three names from that portfolio are worth recording: FireEye, McAfee, and Ixia.
The portfolio
Each covered a different corner of the market. FireEye was advanced threat detection, sandboxing and analysis aimed at the targeted, evasive attacks that signature-based tools miss. McAfee brought a broad endpoint- and network-security line. Ixia was the outlier and the interesting one: network test, measurement, and traffic generation, the equipment used to prove how networks and security devices behave under load, later acquired by Keysight. Together they spanned defence and the tools that verify it.
The distribution discipline
Value-added distribution is its own skill. The role was pre-sales technical: architecting solutions, running demonstrations and proofs of concept, and enabling the resellers and integrators who took these products to end customers, translating each vendor's roadmap into something a partner could actually deploy and support. It is a vantage point that sees a lot of the market at once, across many vendors and many customer problems at the same time.
Certifications
Vendor and distribution enablement across the portfolio, rather than a single certification track.