Veale looks for channel growth at Vectra
NDR player views the channel as key to growing its footprint in the growing mid-market
Security player Vectra has revealed it has ambitions to grow the channel operation in the UK and tap into growing demand for network detection tools.
The firm has been bolstering its management team to lead the sales push and last November hired Garry Veale as regional director for the UK&I with a brief to help the organisation continue to grow its business in the mid-market.
The network detection and response (NDR) specialist unveiled an enhanced partner programme last summer and revealed that it wanted to move beyond its core enterprise market and get deeper into the mid-tier and expand the opportunity for partners.
“We have established a good customer base, we have established the first set of partners,” he said. “Now we need to scale the business to do that. We are a 100% indirect company – we want to increase coverage and reaching the marketplace through partners.
“The plan is for us to work to identify and discuss with the right kind of partners.”
Veale said those would include resellers and it had the ability to support MSPs with subscription offerings.
“The conversation is happening in the marketplace, we are increasing our partner counts,” he added. “We have a lot of conversations around it to make sure that they can make money at it.”
Veale said the channel had also noted the influx of staff at Vectra and the vendor’s determination to build a team that could turn words about expansion and support into action.
His appointment also comes at a time when the coronavirus pandemic has forced many customers to revise their thinking about network security. The changing working patterns accelerated by the virus have widened attack surfaces and Veale has seen interest in NDR from many customers.
“The attack surface for bad actors has just exploded exponentially,” he said, pointing out that criminals are looking at ways to exploit home workers. “We talk about credentials, not content; analysing the content is cool, but we want to know if they have authority.”
Veale said the market conditions, twinned with its positive channel attitude, made Vectra a vendor that partners should consider getting involved with.
“We are really putting the focus back on identity and credentials,” he said. “There’s no quick fix for it, there’s no snake oil, so it’s detailed engineering competing against very sophisticated adversaries,” he said.
“I think there’s a groundswell coming that we’re building on. If you’re a partner, you want to pitch an NDR with the best of breed from an engineering deployment perspective and we will partner 100% with you.”
Last month, Vectra revealed that its 2020 sales continued to grow at a compound annual rate exceeding 100%. A large part of that growth was driven by Cognito Detect for Microsoft Office 365, which increased by 340% year on year.
