'7 Minutes' with Digital Defense SVP Sales, Business Development Rosanna Pellegrino

**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.**

Armed with its vulnerability management-as-a-service (VMaaS) platform and security awareness training, Digital Defense is taking aim at its competitors in the crowded cybersecurity market.

A security technology and services provider, Digital Defense recently was named a leading provider in two categories, cybersecurity training and education (No. 3) and compliance and risk management (No. 10) by Black Book Market Research. It surveyed nearly 2,500 security professionals from 680 provider organizations.

Digital Defense’s Frontline.Cloud platform delivers vulnerability scanning and penetration testing, while SecurED, the company’s security awareness training, promotes employees’ security-minded behavior.

In April, the company announced Frontline.Cloud was deployed in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. The deployment allowed its Alliance Partners, MSSPs, SIs and VARs to address customers’ security-assessment needs in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Digital Defense’s Rosanna Pellegrino

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Rosanna Pellegrino, Digital Defense’s senior vice president of sales and business development, talks about what gives her company and its partners a competitive advantage, as well as the company’s evolving platform.

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

Rosanna Pellegrino: The secret selling (sauce) for partners is to make it easy to use, easy to deploy and easy to manage. It allows customers to quickly get up and running on our platform and provides information that’s operational immediately. Customers get to look at their environment in a simple way and know immediately what needs to be addressed. For partners, it’s the tip of the spear. This allows partners to start conversations regarding security within their customers’ environments very easily.

We make the whole process easier for resellers and easy for their customers. That’s what I think is the most important piece. It’s not just only, “What can you do for my environment?” but also, “How can it make me more secure?” The ability to identify the vulnerabilities and minimize the false positives is important. The quality of the output of the reports, the fidelity of the data, and just the whole experience of dealing with the organization are key. A reseller can take Digital Defense to their customers with confidence because the last thing they want to do is bring in a product that fails and not be able to call into that account again. And then secondly, it helps them penetrate into new accounts with a product that is effective, efficient, has quality of output and is differentiated in the market.

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Do you work with masters and/or distributors?

RP: No tiers, no certifications and no levels because we’re looking for strategic partners — ideally partners that can wrap services around our offering because it makes a more complete solution to their end users. What we do for them is protect them in the opportunity. We offer deal registration, which is an industry standard, but we also offer …

… protection around deal enablement and fulfilment. If they bring us a deal, then at the end the customer procurement team needs to get additional bids, (and) we protect their enablement margin. Anybody that comes to us saying they want to bid this opportunity gets a fulfillment margin. There is a huge delta in that so that they can’t come in and take the deal away from a partner that’s actually worked the deal. That’s protection, more than just incentive. If you put the time in, we will protect you through every opportunity and to ensure that account ownership. (No work with masters or distributors.)

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

RP: (Sales through channel) 30 to 40 percent, less than 20 (partners), (average margin) 25 percent.

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

RP: Rapid 7, Qualys, Tenable. And what makes us better is our offering. There’s no hardware or software for partners to maintain. Digital Defense maintains all that, eliminating the burden. All of Digital Defense’s platform resides within the AWS platform. The patents we have on our technology differentiates us from competitors because those patents actually remove the pain points that customers have today with many other platforms.

At the end of the day, what makes me different than my competition is our platform. It makes the end users’ job easier because there are [fewer] false positives, it is easy to use, easy to deploy, and then we have a team of subject-matter experts that they can call on when questions arise or they need something researched. We supply a staff of resources that are dedicated to our customers, so they would know the person’s customer and partner contacts by name. And for the reseller, it helps because the reseller can go, “OK, Mr. Customer, let’s call your client advocate or I can call your client advocate and we can work through this issue.” It makes it a seamless process and everybody’s working together, and it’s not a pool of people all over the world where you might not get the same guy and have to re-explain yourself each time you call in.

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

RP: The current platform will continue to evolve. There are areas that Digital Defense is looking to expand in that will enhance and complement our offerings. In other areas it will be more strategic to partner with best-in-class platforms where there is benefit to our mutual customers to integrate. As our competitors evolve, they’re looking to capture revenue by getting into other areas … where they are encroaching on their partners’ customer products. We’re developing our platform, making sure that it continually evolves and identifies vulnerabilities, and gives you good, clean data. But having said that, there are some complementary overlays or adjacent areas that we may want to bring into the platform to see how we can make it even stronger and more effective for our customers.

For example, Digital Defense’s move into the cyber threat space occurred as a result of …

… expressed interest from our client base and a strategic focus on growth through expansion of products and services that are adjacent to the company’s core security assessment offerings. The new cyber-threat line provides a natural complement to our current suite of solutions. Our clients can now receive relevant, actionable threat intelligence, gleaned from the dark, deep and surface web which may help thwart current or future cyberattacks through high quality cyber threat evaluations.

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

RP: From a strategic prospective, as I look at my current channel partners and as the threat landscape changes, the platform supports their changing business to address their customer needs. Businesses need to get to the point where they could remediate or be proactive, so I see the platform evolving to a point that it helps strengthen the partner offering, therefore strengthening the security posture of their customers. Most organizations are still evolving from a security maturity perspective. There isn’t enough talent and expertise to fill the gaps today. So For Digital Defense, being able to provide something that helps them become subject-matter experts to their customers helps them (as well as us) grow.

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

RP: Customers and resellers should know that our Frontline platform is a highly scalable, very stable platform that provides relevant, actionable data at competitive pricing. For partners, that translates into opportunities because it differentiates them. What partners need to consider is everyone is selling multiple competing solutions. When you go into an opportunity, you might have three or four guys quoting the same product (in a tiered partner structure). You might be going up against a competitive reseller, at a disadvantage as their margin is maybe a 40 percent discount and you may only get 20 percent, so you’re already at a disadvantage especially when you’re trying to break into new accounts. What we offer is a stable, scalable, effective product that differentiates you, and also protects your margins and your price point.