SIEM industry veteran Michael Seguinot is tasked with building up and enabling a select EclecticIQ channel to target the enterprise and SMB markets in the U.S. and Canada.
Michael Seguinot, North American Channel Manager, EclecticIQ
European threat intelligence orchestration provider EclecticIQ is beefing up their presence in the North American market. Last year they established offices in Herndon VA to serve the U.S. and Canadian markets. Now they are increasing their investment here, with the recruitment of SIEM veteran Michael Seguinot as North American Channel Manager. The channel is relatively new to EclecticIQ as a whole, and the channel in North America in particular is especially nascent. Seguinot was brought on board to build up that channel presence in North America.
Seguinot has 15 years of experience in the SIEM industry, most recently with Exabeam Federal, where he held a similar role, and where he built the Exabeam U.S. Federal business.
“Next-generation SIEMs are all about how quick you detect threats – but they all boil down to the Intel,” Seguinot told ChannelBuzz. “We are all about security orchestration and response, and our tool takes in threat intelligence, and we complement SIEMs. Some next-gen SIEM providers have been approachable as far as we are concerned, because they see us as a differentiator for them. We are also very complementary to many other solutions like Splunk and ArcSight.”
The company’s head offices are in Amsterdam, and both co-founders came from there.
“The company’s founders came out of the threat intelligence space,” Seguinot said. “They saw that if you have good threat intelligence, you can be more proactive on defending the network, not just reacting to it. So they developed a threat intelligence platform that would enable organizations to be more proactive, and we also have our own analysts who look at curated data for customers.
“The founders’ second premise was that a lot comes down to analysts who have to make intelligent decisions,” Seguinot added. “So with a platform based on STIX and TAXII, they made it very analyst-focused so analysts can do something with it. That has been a real differentiator. It has helped us do very well in national cybersecurity centres and global financial institutions, because it makes it into something that customers can devour.”
EclecticIQ’s customers fall into two basic groups.
“One is large enterprises with threat intelligence teams,” Seguinot said. “When they see our tool, a light goes on. The second is SMBs who have some systems set up, but who are not threat intelligence experts at all. They are customers of our Fusion Center threat intelligence bundles, which are curated and customized for specific types of customers.”
The channel is relatively new.
“Most business has been through strategic direct relationships and strategic partnerships,” Seguinot said. “The channel really only became a factor in this calendar year. We first hired someone for the channels role in Europe, who put a channel program in place globally for the company. A few partners were brought on board early on, and we are now enabling them.”
In North America, there is a wholly-owned U.S.-based subsidiary, which was established in 2017, with Dane Coyer becoming General Manager of EclecticIQ North America. The sales team came on board a year ago. They presently have about a half-dozen partners who they are working with in the U.S. and Canada, and who have brought them opportunities.
“We are hoping to ramp that up, although we are being pretty exclusive on who we are picking,” Seguinot said. “I’m leveraging my background in SIEM to focus on companies who we consider to be trusted advisors for the Fortune 500.”
All of these early North American partners are enterprise-focused, as the SMB market that EclecticIQ has begun to explore in Europe is in a more rudimentary state here.
“Right now in North America, that market its very small,” Seguinot stated “Customers here have been larger enterprises, although we have targeted some key MSP partners as targets for recruitment.” Building that channel to sell the Fusion Center bundles is a priority for Seguinot.
EclecticIQ has had some early success in Canada in the federal space.
“We are seeing more activity with Canadian government than the U.S. government right now,” Seguinot indicated. “We have done very well with governments in general. Other NATO nations in Europe have been very pleased with us. A lot of government is about information sharing in ISACs [Information Sharing and Analysis Centres] and our tools are very good at that. We expect our success in the Canadian government will help us in the corporate space.”
This referenceability is critical in Seguinot’s strategy to build EclecticIQ’s channel business in North America.
“The key is that referenceability,” he stressed. “We have come to enterprise customers with cold calls or through networking and have got meetings. What we are seeing is they are all aware of threat intelligence, but not many are happy with the solution they have now. Threat intelligence tends to be presented as an incident compromise manager, which alerts customers to problems, but doesn’t give them the ability to really do something with it. We can help them there. And we are looking for partners to leverage those successes and that referenceability.”
