Palerra makes a platform which combines configuration, monitoring, analytics and remediation, and is looking to add some select MSSPs and cloud solution partners.
Sebastian Rovira, Palerra’s Senior Director of Business Development and Alliances
Santa Clara CA-based Palerra has announced a formal partner program designed to support a select channel component to its go-to-market strategy for a cloud platform in the security and governance space they consider to be unique in the market.
Palerra is a true startup, which was founded in 2013, and came out of stealth at the end of 2014. They now have 62 employees.
Palerra’s LORIC platform provides enterprises with visibility into user activities, detects anomalies and internal and external threats, maintains compliance and automates incident response. It sounds a lot like SIEM. However, it does a lot more, said Sebastian Rovira, Palerra’s Senior Director of Business Development and Alliances.
“Our platform looks at how each cloud service, like AWS, Salesforce or Office 365, is configured, and does this on an ongoing basis to establish drift from ideal configuration,” he said. “We then look at user configurations across them, baseline their activity and over time assess deviations from what is normal. When we find problems, we provide automation of the remediation – either directly, or if they prefer, by logging a ticket in their ticketing system.”
Compared to a SIEM, Rovira said there is significant differentiation
“We can identity threats and remediate them, and the type of analytics employed has no equivalent there,” he said. Palerra’s solution is strictly SaaS, and has no proxies or agents to impact the user experience.
“We have our foot in several functions – configuration, monitoring, and user behavior analytics,” Rovira added. “We tend to compete against companies who just focus on one of these things.”
The company sells primarily direct – Rovira said it’s about an 80-20 direct-indirect ratio – but unusually for an enterprise cloud vendor, it had a channel component right from the start.
“The founders came from Oracle, and they had past security-related channel relationships, and at Palerra they established some partners from the start,” he said. They have a dozen official partners today, including MSSPs, and others focused on cloud solutions.
“We signed up with Optiv [the security solutions provider giant formed earlier this year from the merger of FishNet and Accuvant] and that got us interest from others.” Rovira said. “At first we got put in a CASBY [Cloud Access Security Broker] bucket, because that’s already defined, but we really aren’t the same, and they do figure that out.”
Rovira said that Palerra is a great value proposition for partners, not just in margin, but in the services they can put on top of their product.
“For MSSPs, this fits nicely into their business model since they monitor customers already,” he said. “For cloud solution providers who offer specific services around cloud services like Office 365 and AWS, we help them add a security component to it.”
Rovira said that while Palerra had these channel relationships previously, they didn’t have a formal process for dealing with them, and that is what the new program addresses.
“With the formal program, we are launching specific differentiation around referrals as opposed to reselling,” he said. “For referrals, we haven’t had anything formal to date.” Rovira said they expect referral partners will be primarily other complementary technology vendors.
Rovira indicated that they had been compensating partners depending on the length of the contract signed, from one to three years.
“Now we have two levels, a Base level and a Premier, with an additional discount if they originally brought the deal in. There is considerably more upside for partners in the new model.”
New partners also receive personalized training and onboarding, and access to sales and marketing materials, as well as demo and trial environments.
Rovira also stressed they aren’t looking to sign up every potential partner in sight.
“We will take it slow, and make sure the partners we get on board are successful, and go deep with them. We expect to grow our partner ecosystem to about 30 over a year.”
