The deal now is just in the U.S., but the company says that the plan is to expand that.
James Winebrenner, Elisity’s CEO
San Jose-based Elisity has announced that it has concluded a U.S. based agreement with TD-SYNNEX, the newly-merged distributor. Elisity will work through the TD SYNNEX Next Up Program to extend their existing partner base. While this agreement is U.S. only, the company expects that will be expanded.
Elisity defines itself as providing a cybersecurity platform for the identity and behavior-based enterprise.
“We provide identity-based micro-segmentation across any number of underlay networks, as part of the move from an implicit trust access model to an explicit one,” said James Winebrenner, Elisity’s CEO. “We use a 100% cloud-delivered platform that builds on a lot of the principles of software-defined networking.”
This Elisity Cognitive Trust platform combines identity and AI-driven behavioral intelligence to continuously assess risk and instantly optimize access, connectivity and protection policies that follow assets and people wherever they go. It integrates asset management, connectivity, and security to do so.
They compete against Network Access Control [NAC] providers.
“Our advantage against the NAC providers is that we have a more granular approach,” Winebrenner indicated. “In legacy environments, there are typically multiple policies – one for VPN, one for NAC, and one for cloud. We bring them all together into a unified platform.”
Elisity’s customers are primarily in the midmarket and enterprise.
“We are primarily focused on organizations with a billion dollars of revenue and up, particularly with multiple locations,” Winebrenner said. “Our customers typically have a mix of private data centres and cloud, with some physical footprint. We cover a wide variety of verticals, including manufacturing, health cars, transportation and logistics, and oil and gas.”
Elisity’s partner network is relatively small in numbers, but it has been there from the beginning.
“We started from Day One working with partners,” Winebrenner noted. “We began working with WWT even before we came out of stealth. We are working now with a number of Tier One partners across North America, and through the AWS marketplace. We are in the high single digits now in terms of the number of partners, and we are not looking at getting any larger than 20 at this point.”
The role of TD-SYNNEX will be to identify the quality partners in their ranks who would be a good fit for Elisity, and aid in bringing them together.
“We were brought into talking with distribution – originally SYNNEX before the merger – through Tier One partners,” Winebrenner said. “At this point for us, it’s all about recruiting that next stage of partner. “We are excited to look at identifying that next set of strategic partners.”
Winebrenner indicated the type of partner they are looking for.
“Partners who are a good fit for us are focused on delivering network security to customers, helping them evolve from on-prem hardware to cloud delivered and next-generation security technologies,” he said. “We do want to stay focused on our core verticals.”
Winebrenner also indicated that Elisity is expanding the amount of business that it does through partners.
“We are now very focused identifying resellers and working with them, including bringing opportunities found by our direct staff to fulfill through partners,” he said. They do not have a formal partner program at this point.
“Right now, our agreement with TD-SYNNEX is just for the US but that will expand,” Winebrenner added. “We have customers who have a presence in Canada, but we do not have a direct presence in Canada today.”
