Vijilan Builds Momentum

Dabbling on the edge of security and worried that you’ll lose customers if you don’t step up and expand your capabilities? Not able to invest in a fully capable security operation center (SOC) or pay top-dollar for a team of security experts?

That’s where a new crop of companies including Vijilan can help. Instead of building out your own security operation, you can turn to the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., company, which provides MSPs with 24/7 security protection for their customers. The company’s services bundle sits atop a managed service provider offering, providing cyber threat monitoring and detection, data analysis and threat response that leads to remediation.

Since launching in the U.S. in June, the company has signed more than 70 partners and has a pipeline full of others ready to join its partner program. One reason it is attracting attention: Vijilan is 100-percent channel committed; it doesn’t sell direct to end users.

This week, MSPmentor caught up with two of Vijilan’s top U.S. leaders, Chief Marketing Officer Gary Mullen and Marketing Vice President Tom Fitzpatrick. The two reviewed progress made by Vijilan this year and looked ahead to changes coming in 2016.

^{Gary Mullen}

Several of the partners the company has recruited of late had considered building out their own SOCs but abandoned their plans after realizing the breadth and scale required of them that Vijilan could provide. One partner who signed up with Vijilan scrapped plans to continue with a well-known SIEM vendor that charged $15,000 per month. The reason? Vijilan’s ability to remediate security problems that the SIEM provider could address.

“I cannot tell you the number of conversations that we are having with partners who have invested in a SIEM platform but really want someone else to manage it due to a lack of expertise or capabilities,” says Fitzpatrick. “Many are realizing that security can be more than they bargained for.”

This is especially worrisome as cyber threats growth and customer demands increase. “Customers want more than a trusted advisor and more of a trusted provided,” says Mullen. “They want someone who can take security off their hands. And the same reason that many SMBs want a provider to take security off their hand is the very same reason that many MSPs have turned to Vijilan to handle security for them.”

As for the competitive landscape, Vijilan competes with the SIEM vendors including AlienVault and LogRhythm; full-fledged enterprise MSSPs including Dell SecureWorks; and specialty vendors that have their own SOCs such as Alert Logic.

“All of these companies have some direct sales model; out of all of them we are the only ones that are 100 percent channel sales and never sell to customer. And we are the only one to provide a human component to do all the analysis and the remediation,” says Mullen.

In addition to providing advanced technical capabilities, Vijilan is working to build out its marketing support for partners. To that end, it has put together a marketing engine that it uses to help drive business. This includes white-label data sheets, presentations, thought-leadership papers and videos that MSPs can brand as their own with their logos.

Looking ahead, the company is looking at investing in end-user demand generation, not to build Vijilan’s brand per se, but to create leads for MSP partners. Come January, the company will also unveil plans to help partners go from program enrollment to closing their fist customer, and introduce new tools to promote ongoing education and enablement.

That said, not everything has gone 100 percent according to plan for the company. At a recent trade event in California, for example, the company was told by a union representative that it could not hand out a free, “remediation security kit” that included a tiny bottle of vodka. Although Vijilan protested and said the package was a tchotchke giveaway, the union rep said the company was in effect serving alcohol and thus needed a union bartender. With only an hour ago to the end of the show, the company decided to stop handing out its remediation kits.

“Oh well,” Mullen mused. “It’s been an otherwise very good year.”