New Netacea channel leader Joe Murray looks to drive channel further with new partners, and upcoming new solution

Netacea began to add partners when they moved into North America two years ago, and now is focused on adding some larger and more specialized ones. They also are about to launch a new Bot Attack Intelligence solution that they believe will assist partners.

Joe Murray, SVP of Partnerships. Netacea

Bot detection and mitigation startup specialist Netacea has promoted Joe Murray, who had previously been Director of Sales and Marketing, to the role of SVP of Partnerships. Netacea had been working on a channel-friendly Go-to-Market motion before Murray’s appointment. He indicated, however, that they will continue to ramp this up. He also said that an upcoming new solution, Bot Attack Intelligence, will be of considerable value to partners because of the way that it uses artificial intelligence.

Netacea, which was created in 2018, was a relative latecomer to the bot detection market. They compensate for this with a complexly agentless solution that keeps additional software out of the customer environment, along with no new JavaScript, and no SDKs. They use a server-side approach, which looks at log data before it hits the website, and makes extensive use of big data and machine learning.

“Our value proposition remains the same as it always has,” Murray told ChannelBuzz. “Our differentiation in the marketplace remains strong. With respect to Go-to-Market, we have a slightly different approach. We have signed up some strong partners like Avant and Softchoice, and have signed six figure contracts through the channel. We believe that we now have over 20 significant partners, including MSSPS and master agents.”

Netacea already had a channel in place since they moved into the U.S. market and set up headquarters there two years ago.

“When we entered North America, customers demanded that we work through channel partners,” Murray stated. “We knew that we needed to get then in place. The difficulty there is that part of the channel is still moving into security and is still not really confident about it.”

As a relatively small company, Murray said that Netacea needs the channel for optimal routes to market.

“We are only a 100 person company,” he indicated. “While I set up the marketing and direct sales earlier, we need more partners to drive our sales to the next level.”

Accordingly, Netacea has been looking at potential partners with many different business models.

“They come in some different forms and shapes, from MSSPs with a SOC, to ecommerce platforms to a security vendor with many services in a CDN platform,” Murray said. “We have a fully API enabled platform that we can pass on to them. In addition to the protection we provide, our partners like us because they have decided that they need services like ours, because it is relatively simple, and because it is agentless, they can use APIs easily to work with our program.”

In addition to his channel management role, Murray is responsible for Netacea’s other indirect routes to market.

“I cover both channel as well as other partnership types,” he said.

In addition to his past role at Netacea, Murray has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry with roles at managed services and SaaS companies including BT, MDNX Group and Essensys.