Check Point Hires Distribution Vet Francisco Criado As New Channel Chief

by Kyle Alspach, CRN

Check Point Software Technologies has hired Francisco Criado, a longtime IT distribution executive who was most recently a senior vice president at TD Synnex, as its new global channel chief, the company disclosed Tuesday.

In an interview with CRN, Criado said he was inspired to come to Check Point by the cybersecurity giant's "100 percent channel" commitment and the massive opportunity it has around cloud security, secure access service edge (SASE) and other key areas beyond its traditional network security business.

"If you look at the market opportunity, it's SASE, it's zero trust, it's protecting the user. Cloud security is big," he said. And so for Check Point—which has strong offerings in all those areas—"selling beyond the firewall is one of the priorities" for channel efforts going forward, he said.

Along with platforms such as SASE, which combines security and networking technologies to enable secure remote access, Konrad said that Check Point is also a notable player in areas such as extended detection and response (XDR), which helps organizations to prioritize the biggest threats through correlating data feeds from multiple tools.

"When I look at innovation—when I look at products like new XDR solutions or new SASE solutions—they understand the network," Konrad said. "They understand the space. They've been in it. They understand the challenges enterprises are facing today."

In addition, as customers look to consolidate down to fewer security vendors, Check Point has a major advantage thanks to having "a full portfolio of different solutions," he said.