RSA Day 1: SolarWinds, IBM, Perimeter 81, Dell, Mandiant, More
The cybersecurity industry can't wait until a cyber pandemic to transform security.
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Partners have been involved in SolarWinds‘ business for many years, but they weren’t a strategic pillar of the company. That’s changing, said SolarWinds’ Jeff McCullough.
“If you think of partnering across our distribution resell networks, our global SI and our new emerging cloud solution partner platforms, they’re all key strategic parts of our go-forward strategy,” he said. “For SolarWinds, the first innovation is, we’re really committed and focused on building and growing with partners from a partnership perspective outside of, or in addition to, observability, having a new product to offer to both move the install base to observability as well as to introduce new customers into the environment.”
SolarWinds is introducing a new services portfolio of products, McCullough said.
“These are SolarWinds-branded products that partners can sell, and a new certified services program allows partners to be certified to deliver those products,” he said. “So if you’re a partner and you want to sell a services product, a branded-services product, you can do that now and you don’t have to deliver it. You can resell it and make money selling those services. But if you’re a partner that wants to do delivery, you can become certified to do it. You can sell that product and deliver that product, and you keep the lion’s share of the dollars in that opportunity.
And so [it’s about] defining the experience for the customer and then creating a process where partners can deliver that experience in a way that meets our requirements. Meeting the customer requirement is one of the big changes that we’ve made to our partner strategy and our value story as we look at how partners accelerate and grow, not just grow new customers, but grow profitability selling SolarWinds.”
This summer is all about hybrid cloud observability for SolarWinds and its partners, McCullough said.
“That’s our on-premises platform,” he said. “Right behind that, coming out later this year, will be the SaaS version of those products. And so you will see a lot of big moves from us around our partnerships with Microsoft and with Amazon right away here in North America, and then globally in the first part of 2023. You’ll see our products offered in the Microsoft and AWS marketplaces, and we’ll be participating in their partner programs, allowing partners to sell our marketplace products through those platforms.”
Partners will be able to offer observability both on premises and the cloud, McCullough said.
“So we think we have a very compelling and complete story around observability for customers and then for partners,” he said. “Obviously it’s a great story to tell again in terms of driving product consulting revenue and then services revenue.”
IBM‘s big news at RSA is that it’s acquiring Randori, an attack surface management (ASM) and offensive cybersecurity provider. Randori helps clients continuously identify external-facing assets, both on-premises or in the cloud, that are visible to attackers, and prioritize exposures which pose the greatest risk.
IBM said this acquisition further advances its hybrid cloud strategy and strengthens its portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered cybersecurity products and services.
Randori is IBM’s fourth acquisition in 2022. IBM has acquired more than 20 companies since Arvind Krishna became CEO in April 2020.
Chris Meenan is vice president of IBM Security product management.
“With Randori, our partners and IBM, [we] can demonstrate existing gaps in security monitoring and response functions, to customers in a clear and frictionless way,” he said. “Today, many organizations are struggling with finding the time and skills to understand the attacker’s perspective, and in turn, the top priorities for security teams. Randori helps solve this problem. For one, the actionable insights from Randori’s Recon product and attack automation capabilities help address new issues uncovered by Randori’s technology.”
IBM sees an integrated ASM function helping to drive more value and focus from an extended detection and response (XDR) system, Meenan said.