Security vendor Bitglass set for UK push

CASB vendor has signed its first UK partner and is set to launch its first partner programme imminently

Security vendor Bitglass has signed its first UK partner after raising $45m in Series C funding for its global expansion.

Founded in 2013 Bitglass is a cloud access security broker (CASB) vendor taking its first steps into the UK channel after signing up London-based IGX Global.

While currently in the process of building its first channel programme, Bitglass' VP for EMEA sales Eduard Meelhuysen, told CRN that the vendor will have a 100 per cent channel strategy.

Meelhuysen is currently in the UK looking to recruit two UK-based employees and find a UK office.

"My first investment will be two people and with two people you can address the entire UK market which means we will have to have a strong channel, strong resellers, some strong distributors - which we are working on right now - and make sure that the UK market has been addressed properly," he said.

"In terms of the channel I'm not looking for hundreds of resellers, I'm looking for a couple of really specialised ones which will really focus on our product and put it into the market.

"In order to scale properly we will need the channel, this is a given, so we will probably have by the end of the first half of the year about three or four major partners."

Who they are

Founded in Silicon Valley in 2013, Bitglass recently announced a Series C funding round that raised $45m, taking its total funding to $80m.

Meelhuysen joined in December last year tasked with building the European business, having previously worked at the likes of Netskope, Aerohive Networks and Imperva.

CASB is a software tool or service that offers a security gateway between an organisation's on -premise infrastructure and a cloud provider's infrastructure.

Meelhuysen said he believes there to be three vendors leading the CASB market, citing Skyhigh Networks and Netskope alongside Bitglass.

He explained however that Bitglass is unique in that it centres its approach on the cloud data itself, rather than on the cloud applications.

"A lot of other security products have solutions based on the network perimeter and how you secure this, but to be honest if we move to the cloud there will be no network perimeter, the perimeter will be everything," he said. "So all these solutions are not good enough anymore.

"If you look at the CASB market itself, any of the other CASB vendors really look at the cloud applications and how they perform, how good or bad they are, and how many there are. That is really difficult because they average organisation has thousands of cloud applications.

"The others say ‘let me take control of the cloud application', but Bitglass says ‘no, you have to take control of the data going to the cloud'. We don't care what applications you use, that's not important anymore, what is important is that you know where your data is."

Channel strategy

Meelhuysen recently told CRN sister publications Channelnomics Europe that he plans to recruit around 12 to 15 partners for EMEA, with the prospective UK office acting as its EMEA headquarters.

In terms of the UK, he is looking for a handful of partners and is currently assessing the idea of using distribution, although could not disclose the distributors he is in discussions with, but said a lot of the decisions will be left to the incoming UK team.

"I will need to have my team in place, which will be done shortly, and like I said I am looking for people that will drive the business, drive the market and understand the channel.

"Before I say, ‘this is my decision', I will leave it to the team and say ‘if you're comfortable doing something else then that is how we do it'.

"We need a mixture [of partners] so we'll need specialists and we'll need bigger guys because in the bigger guys CASB is not one project, it could be a part of a larger project."

Dave Robinson, managing director for Europe at Bitglass partner IGX Global, said the pedigree of Bitglass' management team was the key factor when partnering with the CASB vendor.

"From a leadership perspective you've got Dean Hickman-Smith who's senior vice president of sales and he has a great reputation - we've worked with him at a number of his previous companies - so that's a vote of confidence [in Bitglass] and that's what piqued our interest.

"Edward [Meelhuysen] is another guy who has been successful over the years and knows the CASB space. He's ex-Netskope and is someone who has chosen to move to Bitglass after working for the market leader.

"In three to six months' time I'll be able to talk in more detail around competitive plays and how it stacks up against some of the others out there like [Palo Alto Networks'] Aperture and Elastica (acquired by Blue Coat in 2015), but it's more the quality of the leadership team that has caused us to take them seriously."

What the analysts say

Gartner claims that 85 per cent of large enterprises will use a CASB product for their cloud services by 2020, up from five per cent in 2015.

While Bitglass is in the process of setting up shop in Europe, the CASB market has already seen a wave of vendors come and go through acquisitions.

In 2014 Imperva acquired startup Skyfence; in 2015 Microsoft acquired Adallom and Blue Coat acquired Elastica; and in September last year Oracle acquired Palerra.

Bob Tarzey, director at Quocirca, told CRN that Bitglass faces a tough challenge to establish a European footprint because of progress made by its competitors.

"This market is maturing fast and a lot of the vendors have already been bought so actually Bitglass is at quite a high risk because it's entered the market late, and it will have to try and establish market share," he said.

"The leader [in the CASB market] has always been Skyhigh Networks and that's interesting in its own right because Skyhigh looks as though it might be one of those vendors that goes on to become a broader security company.

"The other danger that's worth pointing out is that once these technologies go mainstream other companies reverse into the space.

"Palo Alto Networks has Aperture and that has put it in the CASB market, so if [an end user] has got a Palo Alto Networks firewall and it comes out with a CASB, why go and buy another CASB?"