London, Ontario-based Media Sonar’s platform brings a unique perspective to threat intelligence, which is designed to be highly compatible with complementary vendor offerings.
Anne-Marie Moore, Chief Revenue Officer at MediaSonar
Today, Media Sonar Technologies is announcing the launch of MediaSonarVantage, a global channel program designed to give channel partners the ability to leverage the company’s Web Intelligence and Investigation platform to expand coverage of a customer’s digital attack surface.
Media Sonar’s cloud-based platform enables the collection and analysis of publicly available online data for relevant and real-time digital risk intelligence and investigation.
“Our differentiation is really our investigative lens,” said Anne-Marie Moore, Chief Revenue Officer at London, Ontario-based MediaSonar, who has also developed and is running the company’s channel strategy.
“We have been selling commercially since 2014,” Moore said. “We really started out in the public sector space, with our focus being on leveraging publicly available data. Our CEO, who bought into this group of developers who had a good product, focused on how it could be used from a public security and safety perspective. We have stayed true to that, and targeted audiences who focus on security. In the last year and a half, we have focused on the enterprise space for this, focusing on the convergence of InfoSec and CyberSec teams needing this information.”
Media Sonar’s platform integrates OSINT and Dark Web sources into an AI-enabled platform that the company says massively speeds up the time required to work with OSINT, by up to 30x.
“50% of threat practitioners spend more than half their time on OSINT,” Moore stated. “We really address that volume–speed versus time gap. We built all of our workflows having defined a potential threat, and making it easier to investigate further. That’s critical with OSINT, where there’s not a lot of training, and a real skills shortage.”
Moore emphasized that the MediaSonar platform is designed to work with other vendor tools that focus on threat intelligence.
“There are a lot of great providers out there,” she said. “For example, Recorded Futures are a very sophisticated threat intelligence provider. We add to their stack and add tactical intelligence and capabilities.”
Until now, the Go-to-Market strategy has been heavily direct.
“We are a toddler when it comes to the channel,” Moore said. “We started out targeting corporate security and physical security, so when we did look at partners, we started out going after a VAR audience. We weren’t focused in the right way from a channel perspective.”
They now have acquired a small number of what Moore terms ‘sustainable’ channel partners, which include security consultants who are global, and international VARs.
“Because of the nature of the industry, which is going through some convergence, from a competitive perspective we want to establish relationships with some strong select partners in the first year. We are better served perhaps with a single digit number of very strong partnerships, who specialize in SIEM, SOAR or TIP, and with a like culture. If we fit well into what they don’t do, it’s a great technology partner conversation. MSSPs would be a good fit here as well, and we are looking to add partners there. We want to nurture a select number of strong partnerships. We would rather have great growth with a handful of partners, than mediocre growth with a whole bunch.”
The program is designed to be a simple one – Moore said they would be naïve as a small company to bring out a complicated channel program.
“We have table stakes enablement pieces, but from a value perspective we emphasize that we are capable of working closely with partners on things like API development. We have standard API development that is adjustable to make it easy to make niche API interlocks that deliver compelling value in a client environment,” she said. “MSSPs will like that.”
Partners also get access to MediaSonar’s comprehensive index of Social, Open and Dark Web sources, together with key closed intelligence databases, as well as automated alerts from the Media Sonar engine.
