'7 Minutes' with Cavirin VP of Worldwide Sales Tom Hance

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Cybersecurity company Cavirin hopes to accelerate its channel business while stealing market share from competitors like Dome9, CloudPassage and evident.io.

In May, Cavirin announced the launch of its new Connect Partner Program, designed to quickly increase its global growth. The new program allows resellers, integrators and MSSPs to offer the CyberPosture Intelligence solution to customers globally, addressing the “ever-increasing cyberattacks organizations face on a daily basis,” the company said.

Cavirin’s Tom Hance

The inaugural members of the program are Astadia in the United Kingdom; Bodega Technologies, InterVision and Lite Distribution in Australia; Logicworks and Scalar in Canada; Titans Security in Israel; and others.

In April, Cavirin hired Tom Hance as vice president of worldwide sales, charged with leading the company’s overall enterprise, commercial and channel strategy. Prior to Cavirin, he served as VP of sales at Nyotron, and previously founded and served as the CEO of GovAssure, a federally focused network security systems integration company.

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Hance talks about his company’s channel strategy, and what his company has to offer resellers and other partner types.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Tom Hance: Security is a very crowded space, with literally hundreds of niche vendors, each with their own approaches to solving specific problems. Then there are the Goliaths of the market: Cisco, Checkpoint, Palo Alto and others. In all, this is a $100 billion market. The channel is caught between these two dynamics, looking for new products and services that will help them to differentiate and expand their reach. Here is where cloud security comes into play, a fairly recent market but, looking at the recent Gartner security conference, was by far the topic of greatest interest, and more importantly, investment.

The channel requires a product that is easy to adopt and sell, one where they can demonstrate a real business outcome. This is where our CyberPosture Intelligence solution comes into play, applicable to both security resellers who market it directly to end customers, as well as MSSPs who will deploy the solution as part of a managed offering. The latter type of partner will use it to further differentiate their offerings, especially as they relate to cloud migration. We’ve been told that our offering is best-in-class as it relates to ease of deployment and use, especially across multiple cloud providers.

CP: Describe your channel program — heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? 

TH: We introduced our program in May of this year – with eight launch partners – so we are just gearing up. We’ve set tiers, as would be expected, and plan to introduce training for certifications. One point, looking back to the first response, is that our solution is very simple to deploy and operate, so training will be an order of magnitude simpler than some competitive products on the market. … We are working with security resellers, global systems integrators (GSIs) and MSSPs.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

TH: Currently, channel sales are very low since we’ve just launched the program, but by 2019 we’re expecting …

… over 50 percent of our revenue to come through the channel. This may grow substantially as we bring on-line large Sis and MSSPs. We are currently working with 10-plus partners and should grow that three or four times by the end of 2018. I’ll have to get back to you on the margin question, though the overall strategy is for our partners to be able to offer higher-margin security services with our solution.

CP: Do you work with any master agents or distributors now? If so, which ones, and if not, do you expect to establish these relationships?

TH: We don’t; however, we see a major opportunity in working with GSIs and MSSPs, who are probably better aligned to the type of solution we offer than distributors. In parallel, we are establishing relationships with security specialists such as Scalar in Canada, Lite Distribution in Australia, and Titans in Israel. We see these relationships as a way to bring our solution into new markets in advance of on-the-ground sales teams.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

TH: Based on our capabilities, we compete with the cloud security posture pure-play vendors, such as Dome9, CloudPassage and evident.io, now part of Palo Alto Networks. However, our ability to assess the actual on-prem or cloud workloads (servers) permits our partners to offer a more complete solution. Here, we sometimes run up against Qualys and Tenable.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

TH: The hybrid-cloud security market is still in its early stages of growth, so vendors, working with customers, are still learning about the exact capabilities required to meet business needs. This is especially true across a hybrid infrastructure, while effectively integrating with the security tools offered by the public-cloud providers themselves. And, not to dig up machine learning, we expect more effective application of this in the cloud-security space given the amount of data that must be correlated. So, we expect our portfolio to evolve, and therefore, the solutions and services offered via our channel.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

TH: We want to first make successes of our launch partners, and then grow from there. I see additional regional security specialists, and our solution becoming firmly embedded in the managed-security offerings of major GSIs and MSSPs.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

TH: We’ve been told by our customers and prospects that we are very much customer-driven. I know everyone says that, but we do place a high value on our customers’ business success. We bring this approach over into our channel program. Since the program is new, we’ve also been able to look around and put in place best practices for this space.