‘7 Minutes’ with Cavirin VP of Worldwide Sales Tom Hance

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Cybersecurity company Cavirin hopes to accelerate its channel business while stealing market share from competitors like Dome9, CloudPassage and evident.io.

In May, Cavirin announced the launch of its new Connect Partner Program, designed to quickly increase its global growth. The new program allows resellers, integrators and MSSPs to offer the CyberPosture Intelligence solution to customers globally, addressing the “ever-increasing cyberattacks organizations face on a daily basis,” the company said.

Cavirin’s Tom Hance

The inaugural members of the program are Astadia in the United Kingdom; Bodega Technologies, InterVision and Lite Distribution in Australia; Logicworks and Scalar in Canada; Titans Security in Israel; and others.

In April, Cavirin hired Tom Hance as vice president of worldwide sales, charged with leading the company’s overall enterprise, commercial and channel strategy. Prior to Cavirin, he served as VP of sales at Nyotron, and previously founded and served as the CEO of GovAssure, a federally focused network security systems integration company.

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Hance talks about his company’s channel strategy, and what his company has to offer resellers and other partner types.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Tom Hance: Security is a very crowded space, with literally hundreds of niche vendors, each with their own approaches to solving specific problems. Then there are the Goliaths of the market: Cisco, Checkpoint, Palo Alto and others. In all, this is a $100 billion market. The channel is caught between these two dynamics, looking for new products and services that will help them to differentiate and expand their reach. Here is where cloud security comes into play, a fairly recent market but, looking at the recent Gartner security conference, was by far the topic of greatest interest, and more importantly, investment.

The channel requires a product that is easy to adopt and sell, one where they can demonstrate a real business outcome. This is where our CyberPosture Intelligence solution comes into play, applicable to both security resellers who market it directly to end customers, as well as MSSPs who will deploy the solution as part of a managed offering. The latter type of partner will use it to further differentiate their offerings, especially as they relate to cloud migration. We’ve been told that our offering is best-in-class as it relates to ease of deployment and use, especially across multiple cloud providers.

CP: Describe your channel program — heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? 

TH: We introduced our program in May of this year – with eight launch partners – so we are just gearing up. We’ve set tiers, as would be expected, and plan to introduce training for certifications. One point, looking back to the first response, is that our solution is very simple to deploy and operate, so training will be an order of magnitude simpler than some competitive products on the market. … We are working with security resellers, global systems integrators (GSIs) and MSSPs.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

TH: Currently, channel sales are very low since we’ve just launched the program, but by 2019 we’re expecting …