Risk intelligence solution Agiliance pulls an Oracle, rebranding itself after its RiskVision product. RiskVision has done most of its business direct in the past, but is aggressively looking to change that, looking to add VAR, solution provider and MSSP partners.

Sunnyvale CA based-Agiliance, which sells risk intelligence solutions, with a historical sweet spot in the high end of the market, is looking to expand its addressable market significantly. The company is rebranding itself after its RiskVision platform. It is also looking to significantly expand its channel business, which did less than half of its revenues in 2015, by about 25 per cent this year,

Agiliance, which began operations in 2007, evolved its business model significantly since then. Its founder was a founding engineer at ArcSight, which makes analytics and intelligence software for SIEMs, and was ultimately acquired by HP. Agiliance’s initial focus was on selling compliance-related workflow reporting policy software.

“Eventually, while compliance was still important, mature customers were taking more of a risk-based approach, and we increasingly positioned the company all about risk,” said Joe Fantuzzi, RiskVision’s CEO. Their customers tended to be very large organizations across many sectors, principally in North America but also in Europe, and including Deutsche Bank, Cisco, Safeway, and the Departments of Veterans Affairs of Health and Human Services in the U.S. federal government.

“They use us in a mission-critical way to manage risk,” Fantuzzi said. “That involves assessing how they are performing using risk as the calculation, measuring risk by business unit to give a business view of security.” They calculate risk in every organization from high level down to individual nodes, and provide real-time ways to mitigate those risks, in a format that makes the customer able to report to their regulators. In the VA for example. 1.8 million assets are checked daily to assess risk.

Agiliance just finished a record year in 2015, with demand for the RiskVision platform growing significantly in 2015, and its license subscriptions increasing by nearly 250 per cent. Agiliance’s growth rate for the year was 34 per cent, with 50 per cent net new logos added to its client roster. Accordingly, the company made the decision to brand itself around its platform going forward, which better defines what they do and the value they provide.

Going forward, RiskVision is also broadening out in several ways. While not all their customers are large enterprises, that has been their sweet spot, and they want to broaden out below that segment of the market. To do that, RiskVision plans to significantly expand their channel businesses, including working with newer types of partners like MSSPs who serve those markets.

“Virtually every SME organization should be looking at us,” Fantuzzi said. “Cyber-breaches don’t just happen to large organizations. SMEs have to carry cyber insurance now to protect them from a major breach. Credit unions and regional banks are liable through same regulations as large banks. Other products do part of the job we do to protect them, but the sophistication of today’s attackers means they need a full solution.”

RiskVision’s channel serves very large, and mid-size customers as well as SMEs.

“One partner, Three Wire recently did a large Veterans Affairs deal,” Fantuzzi said. “They’ve become a very large part of our go-to-market strategy and have done multiple deals.

“We have three basic types of partners,” he added. One is the traditional VAR, like Three Wire and Optiv. Another is more of a solution provider, whether a small boutique or Deloitte, where the focus is really on after-sale services. The third is MSSPs, and that’s an emerging channel for us. It includes Bell Canada, who use us for privacy and security analytics, and that channel is a main route to the lower part of the market. Working with MSSPs, we give them the tools to sell the same package multiple times. Large organizations want more customization, but medium-sized ones aren’t concerned about this.”

“Another main value the channel brings to us is the consulting VARs provide to small and mid-sized companies they haven’t had before, said Stephen Sharbach, Channel Director at RiskVision. “Resellers know us well enough to recommend us where it makes sense.”

Today, RiskVision has over 50 partners in North America, who last year did 45 per cent of the company’s business.

“That’s not good enough,” Fantuzzi said. “This year, our goal is 70 per cent. We think the natural goal for our business is about 90 per cent, because there will always be some customers who insist on buying direct.”

Fantuzzi said the senior management has a strong channel background, having been in completely channel companies like Autodesk and Macromedia.

“Our internal sales plan is slightly advantageous to sell through the channel,” he stated. “Everything down to the sales comp plan is driven to be channel first.”

The plan is also to expand significantly the number of partners.

“It will require a much larger channel over time,” Fantuzzi said. “We recently heard from Avnet, who came to us wanting to work with us, and we have been talking with them about that. That distribution channel is really important to us because our own sales force can’t get to that part of the market.”