Fireglass, whose technology is based on isolating potential threats from the Internet, testing them, transforming them into benign content, and passing them on to the customer in real time, has announced its initial partner program. A key element – the always popular high margins.
Guy Guzner, Fireglass’s Founder and CEO
Security startup Fireglass has announced the creation of its SPARK Partner Program, designed to support its partners who – unusually for a startup – are their entire route to market.
Fireglass sees its core value as its ability to separate themselves in a crowded security space by offering a unique solution to the market.
“There are tons of new security company, and RSA this year was full of new ones,” said Guy Guzner, Fireglass’s Founder and CEO. Fireglass differentiates with a new paradigm which isn’t based on the detection-based mechanisms most companies have. Detection is based on the ability to tell good from bad, and eventually this fails.”
The Fireglass Threat Isolation Platform is based on a different approach that they term threat isolation.
“We do isolation based on the assumption that if you can’t accurately tell good from bad, you isolate potential threats completely from the Internet,” Guzner said. “We then execute them and detonate them on a dedicated platform, render all the content, transform it all into benign content, and send it to the end user.”
This sounds like a long and complex process, but the trick of course, is that Fireglass is able to accomplish it all in real time.
“For the end user, it is all completely transparent,” Guzner said. “The secret to do this effectively is the way it doesn’t impact the user experience, and for that, it has to work in real time. There is a lot of optimization in the background, and a lot of IP around that. No one else is taking this approach, which is based on the separation of the execution environment and the presentation environment.”
The primary target for the solution is enterprises, which range from the Fortune 50 to companies with several hundred users.
“We are not a point product, but this should be part of an overall security solution,” Guzner said. “Our resellers sell solutions which include multiple products, and we are very flexible, to be able to work with different products in this way.”
Relatively few companies start with an all-channel out of the gate, but Guzner, who spent 13 years at Check Point, which had such a model, said that Fireglass made the decision to be 100 per cent channel-based right from the part.
“We have strong connections with resellers with whom we have worked with in the past,” he said. “Our direct sales, at this stage, typically goes to the customer and architects the deal and then brings it to the partners.
The SPARK Partner Program is a multi-tiered one, and Guzner said that they are looking for both big national resellers and focused security specialists. They have no partners enlisted in Canada yet, but are talking with one, which is in the proof-of-concept stage.
The program also has a Technology Partner component as well as the reseller one.
“The idea is to integrate us broadly with other solutions,” he said. “Several ISVs have signed up, and we are working on some more.”
While the partner program contains the usual expected amenities, Guzner said the margins – also a subject of great interest to partners – should appeal.
“The margins will be very attractive,” he said. “Because we are a new company, we are being very aggressive here, and are willing to give strong margins.”
