While Code42 shifted their Insider Risk Management solution to a 100% channel model two years ago, Guglielmi thinks that there is room for considerably more growth in the accelerating market in which they play.
Michael Guglielmi, Code 42’s Vice President of Channel Sales and Consulting Partners
Insider Risk Management vendor Code42 has announced the hiring of Michael Guglielmi as their Vice President of Channel Sales and Consulting Partners. He comes from Webscale, where he spent almost six years as Vice President, Global Sales and Business Development. His other management roles in 20 years of channel sales and business development included stops at Qualys, VeriSign, Teneros, Neustar, and UltraDNS.
Guglielmi’s appointment as leader of a separate channel team marks Code42’s return to separate management of channels and alliances. Under the previous channel leader, who had come from the alliances side, and who recently left the company for another opportunity, they were moving the two together in their Go-to-Market strategy.
“There has been a shift in how we decided we go to market,” Guglielmi said. “I directly oversee the channel sales and global advisory firms, but alliances and technology integrations with companies like Okta, Splunk and Rapid7 are a key part of our Go-to-Market. It folds into the other side of the channel business. The integrations are sourced and managed by a different group internally. However, once they are brought to market, the channel group takes over.”
Code42 started out as a backup company, but their development of their Incydr insider risk detection solution in 2020 fundamentally changed their company.
“We are an insider risk management SaaS based solution,” Guglielmi said. While Incydr remains their flagship product, they followed it up with the complementary Instructor offering, which helps inform employees on security best practices. CrashPlan, the legacy data protection offering, was divested with a spin-out in 2022.
“Since we are no longer a backup vendor, our channel today consists of cybersecurity VARs, who are now the vast majority of our partners, because of that shift to Incydr and Instructor” Guglielmi stated. “Their markets tend to be midmarket and enterprise, which is different from the historical backup business.”
The company now has over 200 such partners, including large security VARs like Guidepoint, Optiv and some of the big 5 GSIs.
“Insider risk has always been hard to address,” Guglielmi said. “It’s a massive market and also a massive pain point for customers to address. With employees either returning to work or remaining in more hybrid environments, they still need access to collaboration tools, and that’s not going to go away. With that comes risk – of sharing data with unsanctioned sources, and in small number of cases, internal. We bring this ability to monitor not just endpoints in the network but also cloud services like Gdrive, Box, and Salesforce, which are common data exfiltration points. Recently we announced a new Git integration that protects IP and source code.”
Code42’s Accelerate partner program is only a year old, but Guglielmi said that it has already been updated with a lot of different components.
“It addresses both our current set of partners and the go-forward partners we are looking to bring in,” he stated. “New portal efficiencies include new tools to help companies win in the market, and updated training journeys within the partner portal based on personas. That’s all free of charge. We are also implementing additional levels of certifications that partners will see over the coming quarters. We would like to see our higher level partners have more certifications.”
Guglielmi said that some new things will arrive shortly.
“Next month, we are planning new product features that come from partner feedback, that address how we can jointly Go to Market in a win-win way.”
That strategy will involve Code42’s 100% channel go-to-market strategy, which was implemented two years ago and now is basically complete for all sales involving new deals.
“We are 100% channel, meaning that every new deal will be sourced through a channel partner,” Guglielmi indicated. “We are big believers in a channel-first strategy. Since we started this two years ago, we have seen great results.”
Guglielmi was brought in to accelerate that further.
“We do have a great foundation for the partner ecosystem,” he said. “Now that the foundation is there, bringing me on is about generating that flywheel effect in partner systems – creating a very repeatable model around insider risk management and bringing that to our customers. The top thing on my to-do list is to meet with partners and help them understand challenges and priorities, and to increase the amount of channel-sourced deals.
“One of our messages is that the growth and continued opportunities in insider risk and management require more attention and innovation – and that’s what we bring in,” Guglielmi concluded. “We have to educate partners and customers about insider data. 96% of companies have challenges protecting insider data. Having a comprehensive solution for this is something in which we believe strongly.”
