Veriflow Launches Partner Program, Adds Channel Strategy Leader

**Editor’s Note: Click here to see which channel people were on the move in January or here for our most recent list of important channel-program changes you should know.**

Veriflow on Wednesday unveiled Select, a new partner program for its continuous network verification platform, and has named Mike Kay vice president of business development, charged with developing and leading the company’s strategic partnerships and channel strategy.

Veriflow helps IT pros avoid network outages. Its systems give security and operations professionals a map of their networks, and a way to model any configuration or device changes before implementing them. They reveal where security holes might open up, or other problems that might arise causing network outages and suboptimal performance as unintended consequences.

Veriflow’s Mike Kay

Select is Veriflow’s first partner program. Kay tells Channel Partners it is a “natural evolution of our growth.”

“As we have had great success in establishing marquee customers, our attention now is focused on creating scale in bringing our technology to market, create new monetization opportunities for our partners, and ultimately enable our customers to quickly realize the value that Veriflow and formal continual network verification can provide,” he said.

Prior to joining Veriflow, Kay was vice president of global and strategic accounts for Ixia, and before that he was vice president of business development at Procera Networks. He also spent seven years in the Cisco Systems Strategic Alliance organization, managing Cisco’s strategic partnerships with EDS (acquired by HP) and IBM globally.

The partner program is selective by design, and Veriflow plans to partner with a “small, highly qualified” set of partners to deliver high-value services and technologies to customers. The criteria includes: an aligned market vision and complementary market expertise; executive and technical sales and marketing skills; a willingness to invest in collaboration and joint technology education; and executive sponsorship to drive and measure the effectiveness of the partnership.

“One of the unique advantages of the Veriflow platform is the ability to develop custom intent rules,” Kay said. “For many of our partners, this creates a new monetization opportunity as partners can leverage their intellectual property (vertical markets, technology sectors and more). An example of this would be a partner with deep intellectual property in a particular vertical market (such as health care). The partner could leverage their IP to develop custom intent rule libraries. These libraries could either be provided to the customer as a fee-based component, or it could be bundled into a service to provide a higher value-add to the customer. This is just one example of Veriflow delivering value to our partners and customers.”

The program’s selective approach will help eliminate channel conflict by providing Select partners with market exclusivity and custom financial models. In addition, Select is built on specific go-to-market plans with each partner, allowing partners to optimize success, the company said.

“Creating successful partnerships that deliver value to our customers is a key part of our growth strategy,” said James Brear, Veriflow’s CEO. “Mike’s addition to our leadership team and his 20-plus years of experience in leading strategic partner programs at multiple, fast-growing technology companies reinforces Veriflow’s position at the forefront of network verification.”