Rapid7 Launches First Formal Partner Program for Next Phase of Growth

Rapid7, a provider of analytics offerings for security and IT operations, has rolled out its first formal partner program aimed at enhancing its expanding portfolio of products and services, while better defining parameters for ongoing mutual success.

Rapid7 PACT (Partnering With Accountability, Consistency and Transparency) is aimed at equipping partners to directly perform professional, deployment and training services. The company works with resellers and distributors to meet the needs of its customers in more than 100 countries globally.

John Ryan, Rapid7’s director of Americas channel, tells Channel Partners the timing for launching the program was “just right for us to deepen our investment, and further our commitment to our partners — and I mean this in terms of company size, pace of growth, and solutions and services available.”

“One of the big pieces we felt was important was the public announcement of our evolved Insight Platform,” he said. “In April of this year, we became the first provider to unify solutions for vulnerability management, user behavior analytics (UBA), SIEM, IT log analytics and application security. This unified approach to data and resource sharing is core to the philosophy behind Rapid7’s mission to help security and IT professionals manage their environments through simplified solutions. This approach also significantly reduces the overall total cost of ownership inherent with on premise, analytics-driven solutions, and automatically scales to meet the needs of users, helping to solve challenges presented by rapid data growth for both security and IT.”

The new program structure provides partners with an opportunity for growth by rewarding increased levels of partnership and investment, according to the company. Also, it puts an increased focus on enabling partners to deliver its expanded offerings and professional services at scale, with virtual training and certification programs, interactive reporting and analytics, and readily available success metrics.

“We leveraged a number of our existing relationships for feedback on some of our early ideas and strategies,” Ryan said. “We didn’t see a way to build a program that would truly benefit our partners without working to understand their needs, concerns and growth plans first hand. At a high level, we targeted our more consultative partners to gain a better understanding of their foundational goals. To date, the feedback on PACT has been positive and consistent. Most of the feedback we’ve gotten has revolved around our differentiators — that the designed program does stand out from most other vendors. As you might expect, this was absolutely one of our goals — to break away from the norm and lead from the front.”{ad}

Rapid7 considers PACT a “true, holistic — and in some ways, grassroots — evolution of our whole program,” he said.

“We looked at what was working, what wasn’t, and where we needed to get better,” Ryan said. “We looked to our organization’s core values to influence the direction of the program and make sure it was really speaking to our mission.”

“The launch of the new partner program demonstrates Rapid7’s continued commitment to supporting its partners,” said Bob Ruts, Davinsi Labs’ chief technology officer. “We continue to see increasing demand across the Rapid7 portfolio and the new program will help partners like ourselves deliver greater customer value and create new revenue streams.”