With New Funding, Exabeam Plans to Be the 'Splunk Killer'

Armed wth $50 million in new Series D funding, security information and event management (SIEM) company Exabeam is gunning for Splunk.

In fact, the company says it plans to become the “Splunk Killer.” The funding round, backed entirely by existing investors, was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and supported by Aspect Ventures, Cisco Investments, Icon Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and cybersecurity investor Shlomo Kramer.

Exabeam said the funds will be used to grow the company’s cloud portfolio, as well as sales and channels to expedite global expansion.

Ted Plumis, Exabeam’s vice president of worldwide channels, business and corporate development, tells Channel Partners the funding will help his company in a number of ways as it relates to its channel and alliance partners.

Exabeam’s Ted Plumis

“The first is around sales and technical enablement,” he said. “We have just launched a partner certification program that provides partners a pathway to move from sales certified to demo certified to becoming an authorized services partner who is able to deploy the full Exabeam SIEM suite for their customers. This will allow our partners to build out a robust services offering around Exabeam and will be a key component in helping us replace the legacy SIEM vendors in the market.”

The second benefit partners will see is with Exabeam’s rapid move to the cloud, Plumis said.

“The ability for our partners to provide customers with a deployment model to match their needs (hardware, virtual, public or private cloud) means that our partners can have confidence that Exabeam can be the central security management platform for any of their customers,” he said. “We are already seeing our partners taking advantage of our ability to provide their customers with a cloud-based proof of concept, which is helping to quickly validate the solution and move the sales cycle forward.”

The SIEM market is expected to hit $4.54 billion in 2019, according to MarketsandMarkets. Exabeam says it is carving out a growing piece of the market, with 250 percent market growth in 2017, coming off 300 percent growth in 2016. The company is on track to more than double its market size in 2018.

“We are winning deals because of our analytics and threat-hunting capabilities powered by our patented session data framework, which stitches together everything a user or machine does from the time they log onto the network to the time they log out — and compares that to their

usage history,” Plumis said. “Customers are able to see abnormal user activity in an easy-to-understand timeline and then take action quickly and effectively.”

Exabeam has been a 100 percent channel company from its founding, and built its go-to-market engine with partners in mind, he said.

“We have also focused on a core group of security experts to partner with,” Plumis said. “Our partners have been dealing with frustrated SIEM customers for a long time; long and complex deployments, lack of expertise to manage the solution, pricing models that penalize you for bringing in all the data feeds you need, and the frustrations with trying to solve sophisticated and persistent attacks with outdated correlation rules. We have seen with the growth we have experienced over the last 36 months that our channel partners are leading with Exabeam, and we expect this to only expand.”

“As a longtime investor in the cybersecurity space, I’ve always been excited about Exabeam’s approach and potential to deliver the next generation of security tech,” said Theresia Gouw, Aspect Ventures co-founder. “It’s clear from the large increase in replacement wins with customers like ADP, Hulu, Safeway, Union Bank that Exabeam is consistently delivering industry-leading technology to the most demanding enterprises and government organizations in the world.”