Digital Guardian is also introducing a streamlined Managed DLP for Midsize Companies channel program to help partners sell the new service more effectively.
Troy Gabel, Vice President of Sales & Channel for North America at Digital Guardian
Today, Data loss prevention [DLP] vendor Digital Guardian is launching Digital Guardian’s Managed DLP for Midsize Companies, a midmarket-focused DLP offering targeted at the 700-2000 seat market. While Digital Guardian sells their flagship Digital Guardian Endpoint DLP to enterprises through a hybrid Go-to-Market model, the new offering will be sold only through channel partners.
Digital Guardian is a long-established company, in business since 2003, under its original name of Verdasys. The name change took place in 2014, and it was accompanied by multiple other changes, including new leadership and an increase in channel focus, which had previously been just opportunistic.
“I’ve been here for five years, and we have had a channel focus and a channel program in place for all that,” said Troy Gabel, Vice President of Sales & Channel for North America at Digital Guardian, who runs both the company’s direct and channel efforts in the U.S. and Canada. “The channel program started to evolve in 2014, and by 2019, we had 216 North American direct partner relationships through our Synergy partner program. About 60% of new business historically is channel. Last year our channel business was north of 70%. This year with this midmarket channel solution and program, we will get north of that by a significant amount, with the ultimate goal being 100% channel.”
The move towards a channel model has coincided with the expansion of ways to purchase the product.
“While we started on-prem and with perpetual licenses, we also launched a managed service offering in 2014,” Gabel said. “In 2017-18, we switched to a subscription model and moved to the cloud. For all of our customers, we offer the ability to have no infrastructure that needs to be in place, although we still have on-prem for the cloud adverse, a hosted option, and a fully managed offering with analysts.”
Gabel said that Digital Guardian’s design philosophy is also different from other DLP vendors.
“We look at DLP different from other big players,” he stated. “It is a visibility-first approach, which first shows the customer what is underneath the water. We presented a picture of how their data is being exposed, and then determine an acceptable level of risk for them based on that.”
The new Digital Guardian’s Managed DLP for Midsize Companies keeps that philosophy. Gabel said that the main difference from their Digital Guardian Endpoint DLP is a narrow focus on the specific use cases most common in the midmarket.
“We looked at 270 of our cloud customers here and looked for commonality, and it came down to eight use cases around common data sets – eight sets of data,” Gabel indicated. “It also reflects the fact that when you get below 2000 users, the IT security team looks different. There won’t be any dedicated DLP guys, while you are likely to have two or three in larger enterprises. A managed service makes sense for them.”
The use cases covered are data discovery, data classification, visibility into data usage without policy, and the ability to monitor and control Web browser, email, copy and paste, printing, removable media and archiving.
Gabel emphasized that the new midmarket offering is good for the customer and great for the channel.
“It’s now easier for partners to sell, as they have a product that does these eight specific things,” he said. “They don’t have to be experts to sell that. It is designed around speed of consumption. We also have priced it wickedly competitive. We only offer it to the channel because it’s a bundled product price, designed to be fast, simple and 100% consumed through the channel.”
The channel program designed to help partners sell the new offering has very prescribed components.
“The program has a set cost to it, and is almost like a set price, with a minimum point of entry which is about 700 users at a predefined cost per seat,” Gabel said. “There is deal registration to protect the partner, but no pricing advantage as part of it, because the deal reg pricing is part of the bundled pricing. The markup that partners can put on top of the service is bigger than standard deal registration pricing.”
Since the service is only sold through partners, Gabel pointed out that if a customer comes to the direct sales team with an inquiry, they will recommend a partner to that customer.
“While the programs is launching officially today, we have been piloting it since mid February,” Gabel said. “Between then and the end of March, we closed six opportunities, four of which were net-new and two of which included Proof-of-Concepts. We have created a new way to do POCs for this, so that both took about a week. This will further shorten sales cycles.”
