CYREN on the hunt for partners after Cloud Distribution deal
Security vendor is searching for partners that focus heavily on SME market
Cloud-based security vendor CYREN is looking for up to 10 new partners after signing with Cloud Distribution to push its security-as-a-service solutions in the UK.
The Israel-based vendor focuses on threat intelligence services, but has moved its focus from traditional threat intelligence to security-as-a-service intelligence over the past year.
CYREN's EMEA vice president, Atif Ahmed, said this shift in focus was the reason for signing with Cloud Distribution.
"Our previous business model was threat intelligence services. We are going aggressively to market with Cloud to focus on bringing on new partners who are ready to take SaaS solutions to market and focus on our standalone solutions rather than what we were previously known for," he said.
"We have been looking for a distribution partner to come on board to assist us in taking our solutions to market, and obviously cloud has a background in taking innovative and disruptive vendors to market. So for us it was a simple choice to choose to go to market through Cloud."
The distributor will provide CYREN's reseller partners with pre-built sales tools including sales campaigns and email marketing campaigns.
Cloud Distribution's managing director, Greg Harris, said that CYREN's solutions fill a gap in the market.
"This technology space has been addressed, but most companies are aiming at high-end enterprise. What attracts us to CYREN is they are going after mid-market and SMEs. It is a market which complements our other vendor partners which address this market," he said.
Harris added that its aim is for reseller partners to "lean" on it for marketing support, as it can be costly for partners to take on a new vendor.
"Our approach with taking on new vendors is to enable partners to lean on Cloud Distribution from a marketing perspective. We want to help them with generation of pipeline and help them move customers through proof of concept, etc. Do the heavy lifting that is sometimes the line between resellers being able to take on new vendors and not," he added.
The distie will be hunting for between eight and 10 partners for CYREN, focusing on partners heavily invested in the SME and mid-market space.
"We already address those partners with other technologies, so we are confident in the fact that we will be successful in recruiting those partners. We are not looking to go massively wide straight away; we want a small amount of partners where we can deliver a huge amount of value to them," said Harris.
Tony Lock, distinguished analyst at Freeform Dynamics, said that while many vendors already provide some threat intelligence, if CYREN can bring a more sophisticated version then that could provide them with an opportunity in the SME space.
"Many of the mainstream vendors already provide some threat intelligence services as an add-on to their offerings. Quite often it is relatively simple in terms of what they offer. It is helpful but not too good if you are an IT pro looking after a community of devices. So if CYREN are taking that to a more sophisticated level, by actually providing something more targeted to the organisations' particular job functions, then there would be an opportunity for that with SMEs, as long as they get the pricing right," he said.
"In the last three or four years, the value of threat intelligence has increased quite a lot. Its importance has now been acknowledged by a lot of companies. With SMEs, where they don't have security specialists, it is a case of toning the message so that the organisation can actually make use of the information."