San Mateo-based Exabeam has announced a restructuring of its Technology Alliance Partner Program, which sees it move from the flat program that is typical of many technology partner programs into a three-tiered program based on the nature of their strategic alliances.
Chris Stewart, Senior Director, Business & Corporate Development at Exabeam
Exabeam started up as a user behavior analytics specialist with a platform that addressed this specifically. They subsequently added those capabilities into a next-gen SIEM platform, that has taken off and become the dominant part of the business.
“The analytics piece is at the heart of what we do, and it will always be a nice component, but we are really pleased with the level at which customers have gravitated to our SIEM,” said Chris Stewart, Senior Director, Business & Corporate Development at Exabeam. “We are delightfully surprised at the rate at which companies have moved from security analytics to the whole platform.”
The original Technology Partner Program reflected both the original focus around analytics, and the more immature state of the company’s development then.
“Version One came from when we were a young company, and was based on our analytics and our ability to integrate with that,” Stewart said. “One area where SIEMs had fallen down was that you needed complex integrations to add data sources. We took the opposite approach, although that required a lot of inbound integration work on our part. To satisfy and service customers, we would prioritize our integration efforts.
“Now we have evolved considerably.” Stewart continued. “We are a leader in the SIEM magic quadrant. We took a step back and looked at the 300-plus companies in the program and we could see they fell into three swimlanes. One was partners where we had heavy duty integrations, because of customer requests, with Okta, CrowdStrike and NetSkope being good examples. Then we saw a second level, where the interaction was scaled down, but there was still a lot of interoperability. Then there was a much larger group where the relationship was basically data ingestion.”
The new program structure reflects these three groups. The top tier is Exabeam Validated Design Partners, who have at least one product that can be automated by Exabeam Incident Responder and pre-built rules and models for Exabeam Data Lake and Exabeam Advanced Analytics. With these partners, all actions, rules and models will be validated by Exabeam technical staff.
The second tier is Exabeam Certified Design Partners. These have at least one product that can be automated by Exabeam Incident Responder and pre-built rules or models for Exabeam Data Lake or Exabeam Advanced Analytics.
The third, and much larger tier, is Exabeam Integrated Design Partners, who are companies with at least one product supported for data ingestion and parsing by either Exabeam Data Lake or Exabeam Advanced Analytics.
The most obvious benefit of higher tier status is on the marketing side, where the higher level of validation can be used as a differentiator with a company’s customers and prospects, but there are more benefits to having these tier statuses than that.
“The higher tiers have a mutual referral option,” Stewart said. “We also offer them quarterly business reviews with our in-field marketing teams. They get an executive business or technology sponsor in the company – someone in the business who becomes a voice to them. They also get access to our Spotlight Customer Summit [October 1-2] where our top partners liase and network with customers.”
Another major benefit is access to the Exabeam Workbench.
“This is a virtual NFR Lab, which these partners have access to at no cost to them,” Stewart indicated. “The entry-level Exabeam Integrated Design Partners will also have access to the Virtual Workbench, but at a modest cost. In the past, we wouldn’t have had the infrastructure for that.” Stewart noted that these partners also have other benefits, including field alignment and mapping and portal access. They can also collaborate on mutual integration guides.”
A key part of the program structure is encouraging the Integrated Design Partners to move up the ladder to the higher tiers in the program.
“We see incredible value in moving our partners up that stack,” Stewart said. “To graduate to the next level, we ask them to build to our SOAR, a series of actions that trigger automation. That’s the path.”
