In warfare aging back to Ancient Greece, the Helepolis — “the taker of cities” — was a massive, mobile siege tower, the biggest of the big options for taking on city walls.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and a new Helepolis has emerged.  A Burlington, Ont.-based security company is looking to become a solution providers’ secret weapon in the ongoing siege their customers face in the security field.

Helepolis, started out offering protection against ransomware, but over the last year, has expanded its footprint into what Jerry Gravelle, Director of Development for the company, calls “a full cloud anti-virus solution,” one that can help solution providers fill whatever holes security may have.

“What really sets us apart is that we can be de-coupled from the core engine,” Gravelle said. “Our products can be paired with any of the major security packages.”

For example, customers can choose to use Helepolis’ purpose-built software for combating ransomware and crypto-mining software to plug holes in the security offerings from other vendors. This philosophy of working together puts Helepolis in a strong position as a way to augment existing security solutions without requiring a customer or partner to rip-and-replace the whole solution. 

In contrast to other solutions that mostly insist on their whole stack to enable functionality, Gravelle says “we’ve yet to find a product that our product can’t ‘play nicely with’.”

This approach not only minimizes potential weak points quickly, as it works in alignment with existing security solution investments, but it also makes for a much easier channel sales cycle. Instead of pitching the need to replace existing security stacks with a whole new investment to address a changing threat landscape, it allows a best-of-breed approach that preserves the existing investment, while offering a simple cloud-based subscription path to bolster defenses in areas that many major security platforms may under-serve. This in itself facilitates a quicker and easier sales cycle for the channel.

We see a lot of customers who say ‘I’m using Norton. How can you guys be better than Norton,’” and that’s a hard sell,” Gravelle says, however “Our response is that we’re not better, we’re complementary to Norton.”

Helepolis is looking to turn up the volume in the channel in partnership with distributor Ingram Micro Canada. 

“We have a big security focus with a cross-section of security vendors, and we really see Helepolis adding to those solutions,” said Kevin Forster, Director of Sales for VAR Central at Ingram Micro Canada. “Everybody has antivirus. But Helepolis adds another layer to antivirus solutions, giving partners that added and conclusive approach to security measures. Over the course of 2018, Ingram and Helepolis have partnered under an exclusive distribution deal taking the technology to more solution providers across Canada. The Helepolis solution plays well from six endpoints up to thousands, but there’s a particularly good fit for SMB-focused VARs.” 

“Medium-sized customers have been the quickest adopters of our technology making for some great partners.” Gravelle said.

 Forster agrees, calling Helepolis’ offerings “the perfect add-on to enforcing that final  level of security in their environment.”

As Helepolis has reached out to solution providers over this year, Gravelle said they’ve found a need for solution providers to find a single dashboard that helps take a look at customers’ environments and discover some of the key security metrics — which machines are up to date and patched, which machines have AV missing or disabled and the ability to fix those problems as quickly and automatically as possible. And it is seeking to offer just that in the form of a Vulnerability Dashboard offering for solution providers and their customers.

For more information on Helepolis through Ingram Micro contact Kevin Forster.