Cybersecurity solutions a focus with Bell’s recent acquisitions

MONTREAL—Bell’s latest acquisitions are expected to “modernize” the Canadian communications company’s ability to support medium and large enterprises in digital transformation and automation through cloud services. 

On July 9, Bell acquired technical service companies Stratejm and CloudKettle, adding professional and managed services expertise in cybersecurity and Salesforce to its existing capabilities.  

“CloudKettle is well recognized by Salesforce in the ecosystem,” said Guillaume Bazinet, CEO and cofounder of FX Innovation (FXI), another cloud-based provider that Bell added to its portfolio in 2023. “With Stratejm, security was something very important for us. At FXI, we already have a cloud security offering to cover the cloud environment, but what we needed was a very modern security as a service offering, as well as a very modern security operation center as a service offering. This is exactly what we were getting with Stratejm, a very modern, full digital security practice that will add a lot of value for our clients and will be leveraged internally, as well.” 

CloudKettle and Stratejm will both report to Bazinet. 

David Senf, Bell’s national cybersecurity specialist, cited the need to bring in organizations that could offer managed security solutions for customers. He noted that when Bell was looking at the market, it saw far more demand for security services, both individually and those embedded within other solutions. 

“At Bell, we’ve got our IoT offerings and cloud offerings with FXI, and we’ve got an incredible amount of connectivity offerings as well, so we wanted to integrate security into those offerings as much as possible,” he explained.  

Senf also noted the need to obtain a platform that gives Bell the flexibility to move as fast as the security industry does, given all the new vendors and solutions across many different domains.  

“Security is about network security, application security, identity, IoT security and cloud security,” he said. “For us to be able to get complete visibility of the attacker at any one of those points, and as they move across those different points, this modern platform enables a very efficient security operations center. For our customers that means that we’re going to be able to respond much more quickly to given threats across a broader environment and add in new capabilities, so as the customer adds in new capabilities, we can keep up with them as well.”  

Bazinet echoed Senf’s sentiments on the importance of Bell’s customers becoming more cyber resilient with the addition of CloudKettle and Stratejm.  

“It’s so top of mind for all CIOs and all our clients,” he said, “You cannot think about transforming and modernizing your client without offering them that cybersecurity that will cover the entire digital world. For us it was it was part of the strategy from the get-go to have strong cyber practices that support all our digital transformation practices that help our clients with modernizing and innovating and being more competitive.”