ThreatBlockr Hires Former Avant, NetApp Cloud Ace

Cybersecurity provider ThreatBlockr is continuing its channel expansion with the hiring of Bill Franklin.

Franklin joins the Virginia-based cyber intelligence and threat defense company as head of business development. The duties of that role include building “a community of partners,” which includes MSPs, VARs and agents.

ThreatBlockr, which rebranded from Bandura Cyber earlier this year, redoubled its efforts in the channel late last year by announcing a partnership with Avant.

ThreatBlockr’s Bill Franklin

“ThreatBlockr is seeing tremendous growth in our MSP and MSSP business,” ThreatBlockr CEO Brian McMahon said. “Adding Bill to the team will deepen our focus in this space and strengthen our ability to execute. He’s a deeply talented cybersecurity expert. Having worked at and with some of the strongest and most recognizable technology brands, he has a critical understanding of what it takes to drive growth and operational excellence.”

Franklin worked at Avant for the last eight years, finishing his tenure as senior director of cloud engineering. He played a key role in helping advisory partners adopt service-based technologies in cloud, security and network.

ThreatBlockr’s Brian McMahon

Franklin’s career history spans across the partner, distributor and vendor world. He worked as an EMC partner specialist at CDW from 2009 to 2011. He later moved to EMC and then NetApp.

Franklin called ThreatBlockr’s network security strategy innovative. The vendor’s platform proactively blocks network connections it considers a threat and reports them to the SIEM for further evaluation.

“Firewalls aren’t cutting it anymore, so organizations need a better way to block threats at scale without overworking their existing security stacks. ThreatBlockr ultimately solves that problem and fills in a missing puzzle piece. As a longtime cybersecurity professional, it’s amazing to be part of the team who’s at the forefront of this trend in cybersecurity,” Franklin said.

Expansion

The company last fall hired former Alcatel, Talari Networks and Oracle channel leader George Just as chief revenue officer. It also hired Courtney Brady, formerly of NoFraud, Source Defense and Distil Networks, as vice president of marketing.

The company in March 2022 rebranded from Bandura Cyber to ThreatBlockr. The announcement included a $5 million funding round led by Gula Tech Adventures, Tenfore Holdings, Saul Holdings and Lord Baltimore Capital Partners. Threatblockr has raised a total of $19.8 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.