Vade Secure, which has over a billion mailboxes under management, mainly through ISP partnerships that also give them data for a very strong filter, came into the North American market last year, and is targeting SMB-focused MSPs.
Maya Gershon, Chief Revenue Officer at Vade Secure
Email security vendor Vade Secure has a significant business in North America, but until recently it has been almost all through the consumer market, and their role has been disguised through ISP and OEM partnerships. Now the company is expanding in the North American space, selling to partners through a 100% channel strategy and working through distribution. They have signed a North American deal with D&H, and are on the verge of inking a second distribution deal in North America with a major player.
Vade Secure is not well known in the North American channel, for good reasons. They are fairly new to the channel, and relatively new to North America. The company is based in France, and while they have more than a billion mailboxes under protection across 76 countries, including 90% of the Japanese e-mail market, they built up most of that through a strategy of partnering with ISPs.
“While there is also some OEM business, the company strategy in North America was primarily to expand by going through the ISP market,” said Maya Gershon, Chief Revenue Officer at Vade Secure. “That’s also how we get our data from those billion-plus mailboxes, which is essential for machine learning. That’s why our filter is so good. We optimize the data from the machine learning to create our filter.”
Vade Secure started out as a pure filter product, which could block a higher percentage of spam and phishing attacks than competitor products.
“That was the discussion in the past, the percentage of these attacks that we blocked,” Gershon said. “Now, and particularly since the SolarWinds attack, the emphasis is on more about what kinds of attacks we filter out and block. With attackers getting more sophisticated, it’s not just a numbers game, it’s prevention against sophisticated attacks that matters most. Our ability to remediate automatically is also a factor there.”
“Our differentiation is still our filter,” Gershon continued. “It’s better because we cover 1 billion mailboxes. Our amount of data is second only to Google Gmail. That’s a huge barrier to entry in this business. However, we have also expanded beyond the filter to provide a more holistic solution to the channel, such as additional functionality for the SOAR space for MSSPs and other security services. Since users are the main issue for cyber attacks, we also have Threat Coach functionality as part of the core product. Whenever users click on a malicious link we don’t let them through – and we teach them what they did wrong.”
Vade Secure’s primary – but not exclusive – focus is on Microsoft 365,
“Our main focus is Microsoft, but our cloud solution is broader than that,” Gershon said. “We are completely native to Microsoft 365 and completely invisible. The hackers don’t see us, so they don’t know what they are up against.”
In their home French market, Vade Secure has a lot of enterprise customers, but outside it, their focus is squarely on the SMB.
“SMBs don’t need a large amount of features – but they do need a very good filter,” Gershon stated. “While we have a lot of enterprise customers in France, we do lack some of the features that a huge North American enterprise would need.”
While Vade Secure already covers a good portion of the North American consumer markets, their strategy for penetration of the SMB space here is more recent.
“While we sell direct to ISPs and that’s where we get a lot of the business, since we began selling to the channel, we have only sold through them,” Gershon said. “Our channel business has been around longer in France, about five years, but last year we picked it up outside of France. In 2020, they engaged SMB-focused distributor D&H in North America, and became a part of D&H’s Cloud Marketplace digital commerce platform. That native Microsoft 365 Exchange solution is the key part of the value proposition for D&H.
“Our strategy for Microsoft 365 is 100% through the channel,” Gershon emphasized.
Nor will D&H be the sum total of Vade Secure’s North American distribution strategy.
“Our strategy is to have some major aggregators in North America, of which D&H is one,” Gershon said. “We are very close to concluding a deal with another.”
The plan in North America is not to have a huge amount of solution provider partners, but with MSP’s, it’s pretty much open season.
“With MSPs it’s a different discussion,” Gershon indicated. “We have thousands of them now.”
Vade Secure has an aggressive sales and marketing funnel to feed partners leads.
“We have an innovative sales and marketing approach, through a set of SaaS tools internally that we connect to each other,” Gershon said. “It generates a lot of traffic to our website. Inside sales nurtures them until they become a qualifies lead, and does a demo and Proof-of-Concept on behalf of the MSP. We help MSPs through the first few deals, although this is a very easy product to deploy, which requires two minutes of installation.”
