Vijilan formally entered the North American market in June, with a security service that layers on top of a managed service for their MSP and solution provider partners, who are their entire route to market.
Gary Mullen, Vijilan’s Chief Marketing Officer
CHICAGO – Vijilan Security, a Ft. Lauderdale FLA-based company which is attending the CompTIA ChannelCon event here, provides security services that MSPs and solution providers can layer over their own offerings to SMBs. Following a period of operating under the radar, they officially launched June 1, believing they fill a massive void in the market. So far channel partners seem to agree, as in two months they have already passed their partner recruitment goals for the year.
Vijilan’s parent company is Arcon, a Brazilian company that is the largest managed security services provider in Latin America, and which has been in business for 15 years. Interestingly however, Vijilan has a very different go-to-market model than their parent.
“Arcon is a traditional MSSP that sells to the end customer, and made the decision to expand with us into the North American market because they realized there was only so much growth potential remaining in Latin America,” said Gary Mullen, Vijilan’s Chief Marketing Officer. “In North America, however, we made the decision as a go-to-market strategy to cater to the people who already had the relationships with the customers, rather than go direct to the customers themselves.”
Going channel even as a late entrant into the market makes sense because of what Vijilan sees as two sets of gaps in the market.
“One gap is protection for the SMBs themselves,” Mullen said. “They are the bullseye for cyberthreats. They don’t make the news when they are breached, but they are much more likely to go out of business if they are breached. We also see a gap in the channel community as well, because MSPs typically don’t have the security expertise to protect their customers. So it made sense to sell through the channel, and not sell to the end user at all. We don’t even market to the end customer.”
That decision to go entirely with a channel strategy makes Vijilan distinct in the market, said Tom Fiitzpatrick, Vijilan’s Vice President of Marketing.
“Dell SecureWorks provides a similar type of solution, but Dell has a hybrid model,” Fitzpatrick said, “We are the only one that is 100 per cent channel. We will never compete with our partners for the same piece of business.”
Mullen stressed that Vijilan itself does not offer a managed service.
“We offer a security service that layers on top of a managed service to provide cyberthreat detection, collecting data to a cloud-based SIEM, which is analyzed,” he said. “We then provide partners with a detailed step-by-step instruction guide on how to remediate the issue. We thus enable MSPs and solution providers to deliver a 24/7 security service.”
Vijilan does sell into the enterprise through partners as well, but Mullen acknowledged that the need for their offering tends not to be as great there.
“The enterprise more universally has the resources and toolsets for this already in place,” he said. “They may have already bought a SIEM and have people who know how to use it. In contrast, the SMB are throwing up their hands. Even if they can afford a SIEM, it’s only as good as the intelligence you can configure it with, and they don’t have this, and to be frank, many of our partners don’t either. They don’t have the analytics expertise to know what to do to remediate the threat. We do, however, and we walk them through how to do it.”
Mullen said that qualifying as a Vijilan partner has some prerequisites.
“Our ideal partner has some type of managed or security service in place already, or at least has the ability to do things like change the firewall rule sets,” he said. “They need the ability to do that for the customer, because we don’t want to throw over to the customer the responsibility for doing that. As a result, some partners we aren’t ready to do business with, because they don’t have the arms and legs to remediate. They aren’t mature enough from the remediation point of view to handle this because they do need some capability there.”
For those MSPs and providers who do have this capability, Mullen said that Vijilan is attractive as a partner beyond that not-inconsiderable fact that they don’t sell to customers themselves.
“We have zero product agenda,” Mullen said. “We compete against SIEM vendors, but they are in the business of selling hardware and they dabble in services to sell more hardware. We have no hardware component. You can begin selling our services tomorrow because there is no product to buy.
“We’ve also made it very easy for the channel to do businesses,” Mullen added. “We are integrated with ConnectWise, and there is a road map in place to add integration for other PSA providers as well.”
Tom Fiitzpatrick, Vijilan’s Vice President of Marketing
“Our pricing is also flat by device, not per log, so it doesn’t fluctuate, and MSPs like that because it’s predictable,” Fitzpatrick said.
All this has translated into a very strong partner response since the official June 1 launch.
“We have already beat our partner plan for the year in 60 days, and will triple partner expectations for the year, which means we will likely double the revenue plan for the year,” Mullen said. “We’ve seen incredible excitement as the word has gotten out, and have a full pipeline this quarter and next.”
Because larger MSP channels are much more common than among solution providers, Vijilan aspires to eventually build out a large channel, although it’s nowhere close to that yet.
“We probably want to get into the thousands range at some point,” Mullen said.
So far in Canada, no partners have been signed, but they are working on it.
“There is a strong pipeline in Canada, and we are talking to prospective partners, but they haven’t signed yet,” Fitzpatrick said.
