Pifini Case Study
Building a global community from scratch
How Trellix rebuilt its customer and partner community from zero with Pifini Community, and turned everyday conversations into training, retention, and measurable savings.
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Summary
When Trellix formed from the combination of McAfee's enterprise business and FireEye, it inherited two well-established customer communities. Then it lost both of them in the merger. No platform, no discussion history, no members.
Starting over turned into an opportunity. Trellix used Pifini Community, connected directly to Pifini Learn, to build a single home for customers, partners, and employees.
Trellix also consolidated three separate learning platforms into one and opened training access to thousands of partners who previously couldn't get it. Within three months of public launch, the new community had grown past 10,000 members.
About Trellix
Trellix is an enterprise cybersecurity company formed from the combination of McAfee's enterprise business and FireEye. It operates alongside a sister company, Skyhigh Security, and serves customers and partners across every major region.
Trellix Academy is the company's training and certification hub, and the Trellix Thrive Community is where customers, partners, and employees connect with peers and subject matter experts.
The Challenge
Starting from zero
Both McAfee's enterprise business and FireEye had operated active customer communities. When Trellix formed, that history disappeared along with the platforms themselves — the discussion archives, the member base, all of it.
Underneath, Trellix was running four separate learning platforms, uploading the same training multiple times for different audiences. Partner access was capped at 2,000 seats — not by strategy, but by licensing cost.
Trellix evaluated five to six major vendors. Every option was too much community or too much learning management. One vendor spent three months without ever granting sandbox access.
4
separate learning platforms
2K
partner seats available
>1K
partners unable to access training
Multiple
repeated uploads for each audience
“Every option was either too much community or too much learning management, with nothing designed to do both.”
The Solution
One platform, not two bolted together.
Trellix made an architectural decision that shaped everything else: rather than bolting social features onto the learning management system, the company removed the social layer from Trellix Academy entirely and moved it to Trellix Community. Learning content lives in the Academy. Everything social lives in the Community. The two are linked bi-directionally, share single sign-on identity, and present as one destination rather than two systems.
A customer facing a configuration problem now searches the Community first. They find peers who've hit the same issue, answers from Trellix subject matter experts, and increasingly, direct links to the Academy resource that solves it.
One identity, every audience.
Member segmentation happens at the identity layer instead of through separate community instances. Single sign-on assigns each member a type — employee, partner, or customer — and role-based visibility determines what they see.
That's what lets one Community serve Trellix, its partners, and its sister company Skyhigh Security at once, without multiplying administration or splitting the member base.
One conversation, fifteen languages.
Pifini applies AI translation across fifteen languages, not just to the interface but to what members actually write. Interface translation lets someone navigate a community. Content translation lets them participate in it, which matters most for peer conversation that can't wait for a scheduled localization cycle.
Trellix also credits the development relationship itself as part of the solution. Rather than routing requests through a fixed roadmap, Pifini worked directly with the Trellix team to define and build features — several of which, including single sign-on attribute mapping and event promotion inside the Community, are now part of the product available to every Pifini customer.
“The Trellix Community has streamlined our approach to support and knowledge acquisition. The intuitive interface and available resources enable our team to resolve issues more quickly, while connecting directly with users facing similar challenges is invaluable.”
The Outcome
Trellix Community launched publicly in May 2026 following a limited beta; partners had already moved onto the Pifini platform in March. The results below cover roughly the first three months.
From zero to over 10,000 members,
including more than 9,000 customers and partners and over 1,300 employees — more than a quarter of the Trellix workforce — with no participation mandate.
50 to 60 new customer-initiated discussions per month,
sustained beyond the initial launch spike, with strong subject matter expert response rates.
Partner learning access grew sevenfold,
from 2,000 seats to 14,000, after the previous platform's licensing cost had capped access for years.
Content consumption rose seven to nine times
quarter over quarter, driven primarily by the partner access expansion, with the Community now serving as the discovery layer pointing members toward relevant content.
Approximately $1.5 million in annual savings
from consolidating three learning platforms into one. Trellix says this figure understates the real impact, since it doesn't capture the cost of building, publishing and maintaining the same training three separate times for three separate audiences.
A cleaner picture of who Trellix actually serves.
Migration revealed that of an assumed 60,000 platform users, more than half were inactive or duplicated. The verified base is approximately 6,000 employees, 12,000 partners and 20,000 customers.
Trellix is also using the Community as a listening system. When the same issue surfaces repeatedly in discussion, the team produces a video, post, or webinar addressing it and links that resource back into the thread.
Trellix promotes webinars and instructor-led sessions inside the Community — a channel neither predecessor community used — placing event discovery where members are already active.
Trellix Thrive Community, by the numbers
10K+
members
50–60
customer discussions monthly
7×
growth in partner learning access
7–9×
increase in content consumption
$1.5M
annual platform savings
38K
verified users across Trellix
What's Next?
Trellix is treating the Community's first three months as a foundation to build on, not a finish line.
Deeper content indexing.
Re-indexing the learning library down to the individual lesson, not just the course, so an expert answering a Community question can point to the specific five-minute video that solves it instead of an eleven-lesson course.
Expanded customer voice analysis.
Currently manual and limited to one product category, expanding to roughly ten additional categories with AI-assisted trend detection planned.
Measured support deflection.
Reducing support case volume is already a stated design goal. Trellix is working with its support organization to establish a clean baseline so the impact can be measured, not just assumed.
Roadmap: turning insights into impact
