The program being announced today is for resellers, while a second program for MSSPs is planned for next quarter.
Jake Alosco, Cyolo’s Vice President of Global Partnerships
Today, cybersecurity startup Cyolo is announcing a restructuring of its partner program. While the company is a newish one [2019] out of Israel, which was founded by a CISO and two ethical hackers, they had a partner program in place before. They found, however, that its multi-tier structure wasn’t effective in putting a new enablement program together. The Cyolo Connected program being announced today is for resellers. The plan is to launch a separate standalone program for MSSP partners, ideally next quarter.
While support for partners doing OT deals is new with this version of the partner program, OT is a significant part of Cyolo’s revenues, and a major differentiation for Cyolo in a Zero Trust market with many competitors offering a diverse range of products under the Zero Trust label.
“OT is a healthy part of our current pipeline and our total business,” said Jake Alosco, Cyolo’s new Vice President of Global Partnerships. “We are built specifically in a way that accommodates OT. Most of those environments are very locked down, and we can bypass that.”
Cyolo’s business is primarily with larger companies, with Alosco noting that they are heavily focused on the Fortune 500 in both the IT and OT work. Between 80 and 90% of the company’s business presently goes through channel partners.
“They brought me on board to accelerate that,” Alosco said. “Our CEO realized that making the investment here is very important.”
Today, Cyolo has about 30 channel partners globally.
“The key is how we get to the right partners,” he said. “We have a good healthy amount of partners now who understand what we do and the value that we provide.”
It is more common for inaugural channel programs to have a single tier and then add additional tiers as the channel becomes larger and more complex, but with Cyolo, the reverse actually took place.
“The old program was a legacy multi-tier model, but it was just not suited to our market at our stage of growth,” Alosco stated. “We just weren’t ready for multi-tier. It’s hard to reward partners in a new multi-tier program when you don’t yet know what level of partnership this is. A flat channel makes it easier for us to find the right partners.”
The Cyolo Connected Program includes a range of services and resources for partners helping to optimize OT strategies. Benefits include marketing support, channel forward collateral and a specialized partner portal to personalized service, trainings and NFR licenses.
While Cyolo does offer training, certification is not a huge focus of the program.
“I don’t always have a lot of faith in certification programs,” Alosco said. “We prefer to work through engagements when training. We do have some training in place but as we grow those key relationships, it comes down to building a true partnership to drive certification.”
The next moves are building out their MSSP strategy, building out their partner-led services and more fully engaging their ecosystem.
“To bring more value to partners, our MSSP program will be different from the one which we just announced, which is for resellers,” Alosco indicated. “The MSSP program will be a standalone one.”
Partners interested in learning more about the renewed Partner Program can join the Cyolo team on March 7th at 11:30am ET by registering here.
