Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Exclusive Networks Canada Exclusive Networks describes itself as a specialist distributor — hyper-focused on cybersecurity and advanced networking, deliberately not trying to be everything to everyone. As the company makes a serious push into the Canadian market, In The Channel sat down with Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Canada, to talk about what that actually means in practice for Canadian partners. Hopkins walks through what Exclusive is building in Canada specifically — in-country finance and operations, and a prescriptive approach to partner recruitment that goes beyond adding names to a portal. Rather than waiting for partners to come to them, Exclusive analyzes what existing partners buy, what they conspicuously don’t buy, and builds outreach strategy around those gaps. We also get into Ignition, Exclusive’s newly launched cybersecurity channel incubator, which arrived in North America earlier this year. The program is designed to bring emerging vendors to channel partners with the vetting and enablement baked in — addressing a real problem for MSPs and VARs who are being pitched constantly by early-stage vendors and don’t have the bandwidth to evaluate them all. And then there’s the Westcon thread. Hopkins spent years at Westcon and Comstor before moving through vendor-side channel roles at Ixia, Infoblox, and Sisense. When asked whether Exclusive feels like the evolution of what Westcon was doing before North American distribution consolidated, her answer is worth a listen. – UPLOAD AUDIO Read Full Transcript ROBERT DUTT: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca and your host for the show. If you’ve been paying attention to the distribution landscape in Canada, you may have noticed that Exclusive Networks has been quietly building something. Exclusive is a global cybersecurity specialist distributor, and the emphasis on “specialist” is deliberate. They’re not trying to be everything for everyone. They focus specifically on cybersecurity and advanced networking, and they’re making a real push to make that model mean something in the Canadian market. My guest today is Carrie Hopkins, senior director of business development and sales for Canada at Exclusive Networks. Carrie’s background is worth noting. She spent years at Westcon and Comstor before moving through a series of vendor-side channel roles, and she brings that perspective to bear on what Exclusive is trying to build here. We talk about the state of play in Canada, the distributor’s recently launched Ignition cybersecurity incubator program, and whether what Exclusive is doing today is the evolution of what the specialist distributor used to look like in the market, or something genuinely new. Let’s get right into it. My chat with Carrie Hopkins. ROBERT DUTT: Carrie, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it. CARRIE HOPKINS: Thank you, Robert. Great to see you. ROBERT DUTT: For listeners who may not be familiar with Exclusive Networks, how do you describe what you do differently from the broadliners? What does specialist distribution look like in practice, especially in a modern context? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. So, Exclusive Networks Canada is hyper-focused on a very curated line card. We’re able to provide the right support structure to scale faster and win faster for our partners. We have programs both for our core vendor lines, as well as our new Ignition vendor lines, that will provide combined deep channel expertise, as well as hands-on enablement through our engineering team. ROBERT DUTT: You joined Exclusive, I guess, coming up a year now. What was the pitch that brought you in, and what were they asking you to build in Canada? What’s kind of the big goal? CARRIE HOPKINS: So, the big goal, obviously, with any business is revenue generation, but it’s also to improve our footprint geographically, nationally. We are also from an in-region support perspective, as well as improving the number of vendors that are selling into our partner community. To do that, we have to bring our partner community to the right vendors that will help them grow their business. So, that’s really what we’re focused on. ROBERT DUTT: You touched on geography and that. What were the gaps, both geographical and otherwise? Like, what did the Canadian market look like for Exclusive when you showed up? What were the gaps, and where has your focus been in this first year? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah, I think the biggest gaps were really more vendor alignment. Geographically, we do have people based from Montreal out to Calgary. So, we do have physical presence there to help our partners with feet on the street, but we tended to be a little bit more hyper-focused on a few of our top vendors. I think for the whole team, and what we’re seeing, is that by curating a better cybersecurity and network security vendor list, we’re able to give our partners more. We’re able to reach new partners that we haven’t talked to in the past because maybe they weren’t aligned to our top vendors. So, growing that vendor list has really helped us expand across the country. ROBERT DUTT: You spent quite a bit of time at Westcon and Comstor, which is probably the closest model I can think of to what Exclusive is doing that’s existed in the North American market. When you look at Exclusive now, do you see it sort of as the evolution of that model, or is it something genuinely different given the changing times? CARRIE HOPKINS: It’s actually funny that there’s a number of ex-Westcon-ers here now, and that’s what brought us all together, is that this is — it feels like the Westcon of the mid-2000s aughts. When we all were working there before 2010, it was just such a great vibe. We had great people that were aligned to vendors and to partners, and we all worked together really collaboratively. That’s what I’m seeing now. While Exclusive Networks Canada is our own entity — we have Canadian footprint, we have Canadian finance, we have Canadian operations and sales — we do work really collaboratively with our North American team, which includes people like Heather Allen and Andrew Warren, who are also ex-Westcon. We’re able to really remember the great times of building up that business and then to also bring it into this new era with all these great new vendors who are bringing something new and innovative to the market, as opposed to just the old traditionals. ROBERT DUTT: It’s not every day you get a chance to run it back, as it were. Keep it in that lane. Westcon obviously got absorbed into broadline here in North America, at least. Do you think the market lost something when that happened? And is what Exclusive is doing filling that gap? CARRIE HOPKINS: Agreed. I think so. I think with the broadline, of course, there’s some great people still there today who are really great at holding those relationships. But what happens with the broadline, of course, is you have so many vendors and you have so many partners, and you can’t possibly give the same level of touch and care and commitment that we can here when we’re keeping it under that 20-vendor mark. We’re able to really go after our partners with the right mix of vendors that aren’t over-distributed, I would say. ROBERT DUTT: So to that point, one of the fun things you’re able to do in the specialty distribution mode is embrace vendors who are a little bit earlier in the game, which brings us to Ignition, which just launched in North America. Cybersecurity channel incubator. Can you walk me through what that actually means? What does a vendor get out of being in Ignition, and what does a partner get access to? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. For the vendors, we’re giving them — again, we’re giving our vendors a team of highly skilled distribution people that knows the market. Most of my employees here have been either in distribution or in service provider and resale in Canada for anywhere from six years to 15, actually, or more, for a couple of us. And so they’re getting a strong team. They’re getting a team with the right support structure. They’re getting dedicated SE support. So we have dedicated SEs aligned to each one of these vendors. And then they’re also getting an integrated hyperscaler pathway as well as we build out our hyperscaler go-to-market motion. So the partners that we align with, we will help them nurture, grow, and scale well, and also enabling our channel partners to differentiate because they’re bringing on something really cool and unique to be relevant and bring new value, whether it’s from vendor platform visibility or network detection and response, but done in a more unique way. We’re hoping that we can bring them that value. ROBERT DUTT: Looking at the initial North American cohort with ExtraHop, Zluri, Docker, Sendmarc, PagerDuty, Meter — that’s not all pure-play cybersecurity in the traditional sense. I’m curious, how are you defining the scope of what Ignition is about? CARRIE HOPKINS: Yeah. I think it has to fit with our partner mix as well. In Canada, our partners are possibly not as verticalized as in some other larger regions. In Canada, most of our partners, if they’re selling networking, they also will sell security, or they’re looking for that vendor that’s going to bridge the gap. So even though a vendor, for example, like ExtraHop — you might think of them as network detection and response, but there is a security play in there. There’s a security SOC play that works really well, and it helps our Canadian partners who are talking to the network team introduce a vendor that also connects them w
