Exabeam’s Ted Plumis Insists on Integrity

Ted Plumis, vice president of worldwide channels, business and corporate development at Exabeam, lives by a pretty simple philosophy, both in his professional and personal life: Honesty, integrity and respect are the keys to success.

“It is critical in business and in life for you to be trusted by the people you have relationships with,” says Plumis. “If you commit to do something, you do it. This is a small industry, and your reputation precedes you wherever you go.”

Thus, these elements are crucial when your focus is making successful partnerships. This of course doesn’t eliminate disagreements or issues, but these are easily addressable when the other side can count on you being upfront with them.

Ted Plumis

Ted Plumis

Ted sat down with us this week to give us his insights and recipe for MSP success, with these three pillars at the helm — if he were launching an MSP now.

1. Be Specific, BE-E Specific

Build out a managed-service offering that is based on providing organizations with solutions that fit their industry-specific needs. Try not to focus on managed products, such as managed endpoint security or managed firewalls. Focus instead on providing managed use cases that leverage the on-site customer technology as well as additional hosted technologies.

A few examples of this would be a managed insider threat program, managed incident response, privileged user monitoring, and so on. Companies today are looking for partners to deliver solutions that solve business-level problems, not just offload the day-to-day admin of their tools.

2. Don’t Limit Data

Build a solution that allows your customers to bring in as much data as possible – rather than limit it – in order to solve the use cases that are being addressed. Offering managed-security services but charging based on amount of data or rate of data ingestion is a broken method.

Encourage your organization to provide as much data as possible so that the service provider can have a 360-degree view of what is happening and provide real results and answers back to their customers.

3. Provide User Insights

Provide an offering that includes a full debrief of all of the abnormal activity happening on the customer site, and tie it all back to users.

Being able to provide an organization with a view of what’s happening with every user from the time they log in to the time they log out, and then comparing that activity to all previous activity by that user and others in the organization, helps companies understand the real threats that face them.

Ted Plumis has over 19 years of experience in the information security industry in various channel, sales and management roles and has been a part of two successful acquisitions (Q1Labs and N2H2) and one IPO (ArcSight). Ted is currently VP of channels, corporate and business development for Exabeam, a leader in the user behavior analytics space and the fastest growing SIEM solution in the market. Prior to joining Exabeam, Ted was VP of worldwide channel and service provider sales at Imperva, where he was responsible for the strategy and execution of the Imperva global channel program (VARs, distributors and system integrators).