runZero “can look partners in the eye and promise them value”, the exposure management platform’s CRO has said of its UK channel push.
Launched in 2018 by Metasploit Project founder HD Moore, runZero characterises its technology as a disruptor in vulnerability management and the “perfect complement” to endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools.
Moore’s celebrated status among cyber professionals has helped runZero generate a pipeline of inbound leads the world over, with prospective customers often coming on board after completing a 21-day free trial.
Now it wants to build a UK partner ecosystem “that’s purposeful, instead of just reactionary”, CRO Joe Taborek told IT Channel Oxygen.
Having launched a local UK presence last summer, runZero is looking to funnel leads to a small number of cybersecurity-specialised partners. It recently appointed Distology as its first EMEA distributor.
“Roughly 20% of our customer base is in EMEA, so it made sense to go there next,” Taborek said.
“That means taking care of the customers we have, but also routing the leads for new business to partners.
“There’s a lot of inbound lead interest, but it’s finite, of course.
“If we have too many partners to feed, we can’t provide sufficient value, so having a curated, small number of trusted, proven partners under Distology makes a tonne of sense to me.
“I can look their leadership in the eye and say, ‘I’m going to bring value to you’.”
“The perfect complement to EDR”
Having left Metasploit owner Rapid7 in 2016, Moore founded runZero to address a “massive gap” in how organisations were approaching attack surface discovery and exposure management, Taborek explained.
“runZero fills that gap by ensuring organizations have comprehensive visibility into everything in their environments and the associated risks. Leveraging a unique agentless, unauthenticated approach enables us to discover assets, risks and exposures that traditional tooling doesn’t find at all, including uncovering unknown and unmanaged devices and detecting elusive exposures” he said.
“It’s the perfect complement to your traditional EDR that customers will already have.”
runZero ticks two big boxes for VARs and MSPs forced to choose between an ever-growing roster of cybersecurity vendors (with the latest numbers from Canalys suggesting there are 6,500 of them), Taborek said.
“First and foremost, our value proposition to a partner is that it’s really going to help their clients,” he said.
“Even though I love to talk about how we have 500 customers in 35 countries, we’re still building market awareness. The reason I want a very small, curated number of partners is so that they can provide a differentiated set of technologies – something unique that doesn’t compete with other stuff they’re selling and other investments their customers have already made.”
Secondly, runZero has a “total commitment” to being partner-led, Taborek added.
“Findings the client didn’t even ask for”
Because runZero sells primarily to SOC, incident response and vulnerability management teams within end users, prospective partners must either be cyber specialists or have a security practice.
Taborek said he encourages partners to schedule more time in their wrap-up meetings because runZero will always deliver a “bunch of findings the client didn’t even ask for”.
“Typically, the customer isn’t saying, ‘I want you to do a runZero scan’. But if the partner adds it to that environment, it’s going to find a whole bunch of risks, exposures and unknown devices the client didn’t know they had – and it probably wasn’t even within the scope they were there for under a billable SOW [statement of work],” he said.
“They’re going to come out of that assessment with a bunch of extra credit.
“I encourage partners to walk out of that wrap-up meeting with two or three more SOWs to continue to embed themselves and provide more value. It’s serving up these risks, exposures and next-selling opportunities to the partner — the platform does that right out-of-the-box with minimal interpretation.”
The assessments then generate either reseller or managed services opportunities for the partner, depending on whether the client wants to run the scan every day themselves or have a partner do it, Taborek said.
“It’s a multi-tenant platform, which means MSP out-of-the-box,” he emphasised.
runZero already has two sales heads and a sales engineer in the UK, and is looking to add a customer success engineer, Taborek revealed.
“We’re excited to onboard and enable a finite number of partners with which we can have a two-way, mutually beneficially relationship,” he concluded.
This article was produced in association with runZero and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
