'7 Minutes' with Digital Shadows: Partners Staying Ahead of the Curve

Digital Shadows partners are gunning for the company’s competitors like Recorded Future and ZeroFox with its updated SearchLight monitoring service.

Digital Shadows is a digital risk protection provider. Last week, it unveiled new capabilities within its SearchLight service. SearchLight rapidly identifies and remediates risks related to unwanted code exposure.

SearchLight continually monitors where an organization’s assets are exposed across sites like GitHub and GitLab. Those include domains, IP ranges and other identifiers. Businesses can remove or mitigate risk because SearchLight flags where there is exposure.

Earlier this month, Digital Shadows rolled out a new tiered partner program and portal for its Americas channel partners. The new structure will allow Digital Shadows and its partners to tailor their offering to customers and grow revenue.

Digital Shadows’ Davitt Potter

Program benefits include sales and marketing help for VARs and MSSPs, who also get and technical support.

The program is comprised of bronze, silver, gold and platinum tiers. Partners also get access to more discounts, market development funds (MDF) and technical certification levels with each tier threshold.

To learn more about Digital Shadows, we spoke with Davitt Potter. He is director of MSSP and channel sales for the Americas.

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

Davitt Potter: The ability for VARs and MSSPs to integrate our product into their daily workflows to enhance their own intelligence capabilities makes them that much stickier and relevant to their customers. [We also] stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new threats from external sources. Combined with our unmatched breadth and depth of coverage, SearchLight allows our customers to be on the leading edge of digital risk protection.

CP: Describe your new global channel partner program — heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Also, do you work with masters and/or distributors?

DP:  We’re introducing ShadowCert, which will have a sales track and technical track. It will help our partners know how to better position and work with the SearchLight platform. While we are currently working with VARs and MSSPs around the globe, we are exploring a relationship with distribution in the second half [of 2020].

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

DP:  Our channel program is up 50% year-over-year; partner count is up 50%. Our tiered program allows for excellent margins with variables for revenue, MDF and volume.

Because our program has different components to fit our partner tiers, we don’t set hard partner margins/markup.  What we have done is given generous margin incentives that we know are very attractive, easy to attain, and allow for a good opportunity for our partners to be more profitable when positioning Digital Shadows.

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

DP: Ditgital Shadows’ competitors are Recorded Future and ZeroFox. The landscape shifts, but in our space, our primary advantages are our sheer breadth and depth of coverage refining the immense amount of data into clear, actionable intelligence that our partners can integrate into …

… customer security operations centers (SOCs) or their own [security operations center as a service] offerings.

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

DP: We will continue to improve our integrations portfolio and enable modern SOCs to fully operationalize the intelligence we give them, to help make better and more automated decisions. In addition, we are constantly adding new data sources, new risk logic and world-class intelligence analysts.

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

DP: My team and I are channel people at heart, so we will always want to work with and grow our partner community.  From a technical alliance perspective, we will continue to explore joint go-to-market offerings, meet in the channel opportunities, and provide our channel partners with every advantage to embed themselves and Digital Shadows into their customer environments.

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

DP: How about who’s a great fit for Digital Shadows? Of course, the automatic answer is everyone. However, as a focus/target market, we are great for any customer — large or small, but who may have a small (or zero) SOC team, who is aware of the new digital risk landscape, but may not have the technical personnel or capacity to manage these tools or build them out internally. We’re also a great fit for MSSPs who want to add to their own offerings and become stickier with their customer set.