Elysium Analytics also announced a new technical partnership with Zoomdata to add Zoomdata's real-time data visualization capabilities into the Elysium Analytics platform.
Eric Warner, Senior Vice President Global Sales and Marketing at Elysium Analytics
Elysium Analytics, which makes a cognitive SIEM that uses UEBA [user entity behavior analytics] in an open source environment, has launched its first partner program.
Elysium Analytics is a business unit of System Soft Technologies, which started out 20 years ago as a staff augmentation company for IT projects, and has moved beyond that to include services like application development as a service, and the customization of applications.
“System Soft is headquartered in Tampa, but also has offices in Virginia, Dallas, Toronto, Silicon Valley, India, Europe and other locations, has 700-800 consultants in different practices, and has been growing profitably and consistently for 20 years” said Eric Warner, Senior Vice President Global Sales and Marketing at Elysium Analytics. “Our particular group was born out of experience in Big Data and cybersecurity.”
The Elysium Cognitive Security Analytics platform launched in February. Its UEBA engine is designed to leverage open source tools to more efficiently deliver AI, machine learning and behavioral analytics through contextual threat behavior analysis in a SIEM environment.
“Traditionally what has been in play in these environments is applications that rely on relatively small amounts of data,” Warner said. “Within that environment, the SIEM world built out Oracle databases that couldn’t scale. We rely on open source for the operation – not the analytics. We are infinitely scalable, and affordable. “We contextualize, tag and label the data in real time to enable real-time behavioural analytics that let users see and visualize changes in behavioral patterns.”
Warner said that their solution delivers value in midmarket to larger enterprises.
“We start with customers of about 4000 employees, who have large enough assets where we can provide value,” he said. “Key verticals are financial services, health care, energy, telco and government. We also view the MSSP market as a channel because the solution is multi-tenanted. It’s through MSSPs that we get into the under 4000 class companies.”
Elysium Analytics is already working with a small number of partners –six – who cover different use cases.
“Because we are in open source, there are already partners from that part,” Warner indicated. “But there are more traditional security VARs and integrators who we are working with as well, like Fierce Software, in the government business. Our partners work on different layers, Some are fulfilment focused, who buy an appliance and use it to fulfill. Others have sales and presales folks who sell it. Larger partners can implement it themselves.”
The program is designed to support a small number of partners, and expand it further as those become successful.
“We do want to expand beyond a narrow base and make sure we have enough feet on the street, but initially we want to make sure that we manage the channel well, like a garden,” Warner said.
The program is a three-tiered one with room for customization for larger partners. Tier level will be based on a combination of revenue and certification.
“The entry level will be where we absorb most channel and they are fulfilment-oriented,” Warner said. “The Gold level is for robust VARs with services capabilities who can offer Level One support, and the top level is for larger, implementation-focused partners.”
At this stage, the key partner benefit is the opportunity to resell the Elysium Analytics Cognitive Security Analytics platform.
“The ability to resell this today in an open source arena is a very big asset,” Warner noted. “It will allow clients to have a longer-range strategy to move to data lake technology to collect all the data that they need, which most haven’t been able to do up to now because they have been restricted by cost.”
Warner also stressed that Elysium Analytics is supporting the channel by incenting their own salespeople on a channel-neutral sales model.
“Our sales folks will have a responsibility to co-sell with partners and will be compensated for that, which will be critical as we build our relationships with VARs in the field,” he said.
“We would like to have 20 or so partners in a year, up from the six today,” Warner noted.
Strategic partnerships are also critical to Elysium Analytics’ go-to-market strategy. They are partnered with all three of the big hyperscale cloud providers – AWS, Azure and Google Cloud – on what Warner said was a more or less equal basis.
“We are also looking at Oracle, although that’s in an exploratory stage, as well as IBM Cloud,” he added.
Concurrent with the channel program announcement, Elysium Analytics also announced a technical partnership with Zoomdata, a business intelligence company recently acquired by Logi, which will integrate Zoomdata’s Real-Time Data Visualization capabilities into the Elysium Analytics platform.
“Zoomdata does is a couple of interesting things,” Warned said. “They provide a gorgeous visualization of data to visualize scoring changes in real time, and they allow with exploring of data in real time with a very cohesive and compelling UI.”
The vendor ecosystem also includes Tableau, whose acquisition by Salesforce was recently announced, as well as endpoint security vendor CrowdStrike. Cloudera is a Big Data partner.
