Qualys reintroduces itself to the channel under new sales leadership

CRO Dino DiMarino and SVP channels and alliances Barb Huelskamp speak to CRN about the vendor's revamped channel strategy and MSSP focus

Cyber risk vendor Qualys is looking to woo the channel as it sets its sights on European and global expansion.

The vendor is looking for profitable, sustainable growth through service enablement, rather than chasing quick wins quarter-on-quarter.

This was one of the takeaways at last week's QSC security conference in London, which focused on acquainting the vendor's partners with its push towards platformification above all. When it comes to channel, Qualys has set itself some ambitious goals.

"This year our channel strategy centres around three primary goals. And it really does stem from the company's growth strategy - build a world class partner programme that really improves the partner experiences and their outcomes for our customers, expand our reach with new customers and new prospects, CRO Dino DiMarino tells CRN.

"And we're already seeing that through partner-initiated opportunities as we enable them, and then expand our customer experiences with improved professional services through our partners, especially the managed service offerings."

Though the firm's heritage is not channel-first, globally, it generates a "healthy" 45-55 per cent of its revenue through partners, according to DiMarino.

That said, alongside Barb Huelskamp, global SVP channels and alliances, DiMarino has been focused on building this up to a goal of around 80 per cent.

Huelskamp joined the vendor in November, three months after DiMarino. Since then, she has been focused on building out partner education as a foundation for a full-scale, tiered partner programme. The latter is expected to roll out in stages over the course of this year and early 2025.

"Firstly, our partners are wanting to see more from us with respect to post selling and how we go to market together. I would attribute a lot of that cultural shift to the sponsorship we got from Dino, from Sumedh [Thakar], our CEO," Huelskamp explains.

"We are really focusing on that partner-centric strategy, and they're starting to see better engagement and partnerships out in the market with our sales team.

"The other thing that was a very pleasant surprise, our partners want to see the enablement, they want to see some of the requirements that we're looking at."

As an early step, Huelskamp and her team are working on bringing a tailored education programme, complete with partner certification badges to MSSPs. This year, the vendor launched marketing resources for MSSPs, as a statement of its commitment to the channel.

"They expect that and they want that badging. Another piece of feedback for the partners yesterday was, I want to be able to bring that, that quality specialisation badge to my customers, and show them the commitment and the confidence that this has in me because of my expertise.

"So, we are taking that feedback, and putting together how we structure that for next year. And I think the way that we're going to approach it is building that iteratively versus one big programme launch."

Huelskamp also notes the vendor has been looking closely at its MDF budget for 2024 and 2025. Though this is the first time the firm has had a dedicated MDF budget, this marks a big step in its relationship with the channel, according to Huelskamp.

"For the first time we have bespoke partner marketing personnel and a discrete MDF budget. Not just partners trying to vie for budget from field marketing, but we have a discrete budget. It is proposal-based for each of our markets, so we could make some commitments to our partners on quite a bit of pipeline generation, industry events and enablement - there's a separate budget for enablement."