The Israeli startup’s service is ideally suited for MSPs, and will be available through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.

Israeli-based startup Perimeter 81, which makes Zero Trust software-defined network security solutions, has announced a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro which will see its Network-as-a-Service offering made available to resellers and MSPs through the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace. The relationship initially will cover the North American market.

“Perimeter 81 was established two years ago, and we brought our first product to market in February 2018,” said Sagi Gidali, Perimeter 81’s co-founder and Chief Product Officer.

“This is actually our second company,” he indicated. “Our first was SaferVPN, a consumer VPN company, which has now been sold, but which became an important baseline for our capability to create network SaaS.”

Gidali emphasized that customers told us about the need for such a B2B product, which moves beyond the limits of legacy VPN while also offering specific things that customers wanted in a new service.

“The old VPN world was a site-centric world,” he said. “We are a user-centric solution based on a Zero Trust model, which verifies user identity before letting them in. The Zero Trust technology is similar to Luminate [another  Israeli startup, acquired earlier this year by Symantec].  What we do differently from other newer players is the way we secure network access. In addition to providing an  agentless user experience, we allow for a hybrid solution. We also have a very simple onboarding experience to the service – around 15 minutes for a midsize company. Everything is done automatically. We are also very easy to use, and provide a one-on-one level of support – not just referring people to knowledge- based articles.”

As a result, the company has strong momentum, growing 75 per cent each quarter and with hundreds of paying customers. They were also recently recognized as a Gartner Cool Vendor for “Cyber-Physical Systems and Network Security” and selected by Frost & Sullivan as a Best Practices Award Winner for Software-Defined Access Technology Leadership.

“The beauty of this is it lets us provide enterprise level security to all sorts of companies,” Gidali said. “Our sweet spot is a couple hundred to a couple thousand users, but we have smaller users than that, because it’s so easy to onboard and start using it, and there’s no need for any hardware, or anything installed.”

That makes Perimeter 81 a strong MSP play.

“We put a lot of thought about the channel and the go-to-market when we set up the company,” Gidali said. “About 95 per cent of our direct sales were from online marketing. We don’t have any field sales. We thought about the channel doing this from Day One. For this reason, we created another layer to the platform, which allows MSPs to create and maintain customers through this additional layer. We now have around 20 MSPs, and plan is to go to the Ingram Micro MSPs starting with their big ones, and expanding downward into the SMB.” They presently have six Canadian MSPs.

Gidali said that while the intention is that the Ingram Micro relationship will eventually be a full global one, they will start out in North America.

“We started the Ingram relationship with their management team, and we were a finalist in their 2018 Comet competition [for the most promising B2B startups, which brought with it $100,000 in go-to-market funds],” he said. We see a huge opportunity with them. Ingram has made a huge investment in their cloud so they are well equipped to bring a product to market that is revolutionary.

“They are also big believers in us,” he added. “In addition to the big prize, they are pushing us through their big MSPs, and sending opportunities toward us. We really want access to those large ones with many end customers – like big telcos – who can see and understand the advantages of our solution.”

Perimeter 81 is currently onboarding with Ingram Micro, which Gidali said will last until August.