Halcyon, whose leadership has been active in cybersecurity for decades, made a decision to focus on protecting organizations against ransomware, and has built an anti-ransomware engine specifically to tackle this problem, which combines multiple advanced prevention engines, key interception, automated recovery and enhanced third party security controls protection. Halcyon has led with its channel partners in the past, and now wants to deepen partners’ impact, building up their ransomware prevention practices and getting them to teach the market that Halcyon and anti-ransomware are synonymous. Today, they are formally announcing the appointment of Dave Pawlowski as Worldwide Vice President of Channels and MSSP, in order to achieve these goals. Pawlowski has been tasked with spearheading Halcyon’s partner ecosystem strategy to accelerate growth, expand Halcyon’s global reach, and enable partners to provide next-generation ransomware defense at scale.
Pawlowski has been in this industry for 26 years, much of it selling to focused partner groups, His most recent role was at Palo Alto Networks, where he was Director of Service Provider Sales for North America. Before that, he was in an MSP-focused role at Pure Storage as Global Head of MSP Go-to-Market Strategy and Solutions. He worked in multiple focused channel roles at Dell, created and launched a Managed Service Provider program within National Partners at Tanium, and was Channel Sales Manager for OnCommand Insight at NetApp. He briefly ran the whole operation at ArcServe, after they merged with StorageCraft.
“When I first had a conversation with the two founders, one of them, [Ryan Smith, who is the CTO] explained their philosophy,” Pawlowski stated. “It was to focus on one thing, ransomware, and to be the best at it. We are an enhancement to the EDRs –companies like CrowdStrike, Sophos and SentinelOne. We layer on top of them to secure the endpoints. The majority of our customers have EDR, but with ransomware, they leave the back door open. We are not a ‘ rip and replace’ for those products. We are an enhancement sale.”
The channel, which Pawlowski identified as 350 partners presently in their program, is of critical importance to Halcyon.
“We are channel,” he emphasized. “Every deal we do goes through partners, and we have zero intention to take any deals direct. They span across all sorts of different partner types. We have strategic partners like Guidepoint and Optiv, maniacally focused MSPs, and VARs. I have a small team of channel account managers, including two people responsible for the MSP practice. The importance of MSPs is vital to us. It’s a growing route to market for us, because customers want managed services, which is very different from 3-5 years ago. Today, they are all looking at how to leverage managed services better.”
A priority for Pawlowski is to increase the number of deals brought to them by the channel.
“The challenge I’ve seen so far here is partner sourced activities,” he said. “The majority of our leads come through our field sellers.”
Pawlowski’s broad track record in getting results from a diverse range of partner types appealed to his new employers, who emphasized that his leadership has consistently enabled organizations to achieve transformative results by designing innovative go-to-market strategies that empower partners to deliver differentiated, services-led cybersecurity solutions.
“Dave has a remarkable track record of enabling partners to succeed in some of the most competitive markets in cybersecurity,” said Jon Miller, the CEO and Halcyon’s other co-founder. “His vision and leadership will be instrumental in expanding Halcyon’s channel program and equipping our partners with the tools they need to help customers strengthen their resilience against ransomware.”
“I’ve been part of a lot of program offices, including MSPs, nationals and distribution, and I believe in making sure that the partner set I’m speaking for has a broad voice,” Pawlowski indicated. “Working closely with my bosses and other channel chiefs, I’ve learned from a lot of great execs across the board, and used these lessons. Pure didn’t have an MSP program until I got there.”
Pawlowski indicated that he intended to make fairly small and targeted change to the channel strategy, rather than major shifts in focus.
“I’m looking more at minor tweaks, especially because we have some really great partners who see our value,” he said. “We haven’t done much with distribution, and have just been using it for the public sector with Carahsoft. We are having conversations about enhancing our reach and leverage there. We are maniacally focused on building our partner pipeline and providing healthy protected margins. This includes looking at extra margin for partners if they bring the deals in.”
Pawlowski doesn’t see a need to add a lot of new partners.
‘We have a lot of partners and I see a need to cut back on the numbers, among those who transact, say 50k over two years,” he emphasized. “I want to be more strategic with fewer numbers of partners. As a small team you can’t be strategic with 500 partners. I would rather place big bets on fewer numbers of partners and use distribution for the rest.”
“Halcyon is changing the game in ransomware defense, and their channel-first strategy stands out in a market where too many vendors still treat the channel as an afterthought,” stated Mark Jones, CEO of BlackLake Security. “ With a proven leader like Dave Pawlowski driving their global channel program, Halcyon is the kind of partner BlackLake Security relies on to deliver resilience against the threats keeping our customers up at night.”
Pawlowski discussed his immediate goals.
“We have 350 partners in our global program right now – many with few dollars – but we do have a great enablement team,” he said. “I want to enable our field sellers to better engage with partners. I want to enable partners how to position Halcyon better in the market, The priority is enabling our field people who know who we want to place big bets on, and helping them create more value for customers. I want to get distribution partners more involved. I want to build up our partner-sourced pipeline. We have 150 field sellers globally, and want to give them opportunities to help partners tell our story. We are working through that, and are getting there.”
Pawlowski said one area where they need to step up is associating Halcyon with ransomware protection when talking with customers and prospects.
“They hear ransomware and don’t know how to take it further,” he noted. “We will step up our marketing efforts there to associate ransomware protection with Halcyon. We’ve been doing good work there, but not great work. We will be involved with more customer demand events around this as well, besides sitting down with alliance teams, and building a better together story with vendors like Sophos, CrowdStrike, and SentinelOne, to make sure they are having the right conversation. Some partners understand the story, but some need to get better at it.”