FireEye, McAfee and Ixia

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 years differ across the three: FireEye ran through the Westcon-Comstor period to 2018, while McAfee and Ixia belong to the ScanSource period from 2018 to 2019 - which is why the chapter spans five years and no single vendor does.

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. The ScanSource line brought Pulse Secure into the portfolio - the secure-access lineage whose full story now has its own page in this record.

Vendor and distribution enablement across the portfolio, rather than a single certification track.