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Corelight, a vendor of network visibility services for cybersecurity, on Wednesday rolled out its first-ever channel partner program as it looks to formalize its indirect go-to-market strategy.

Corelight was founded in 2013 and offers a portfolio of network sensors. The startup received $9.2 million, its first round of Series A funding, one year ago. Corelight is commercializing a 20-year-plus technology called Bro, which provides deep and comprehensive information about network traffic specifically for security purposes.

Corelight’s Alan Saldich

“We have the beginnings of our sales team, and our intent and practice so far is to sell almost exclusively through channel partners,” Alan Saldich, chief marketing officer at Corelight, told us.

Saldich and Steve Mallard, vice president of sales at Corelight, worked together at Riverbed for about six years.

“Riverbed was very committed to the channel very early, and within a year or two [had] 90 percent of revenue was going through the channel. We’d like to do the same thing here,” said Saldich.

The Corelight channel program is a three-tier model – silver, gold and platinum – and offers the usual partner benefits: deal registration, demo unit offers, customer subscription renewal tracking, priority lead distribution and co-marketing opportunities.

While current requirements aren’t rigorous, the company expects partners to invest in training and education — and higher-level partners can expect increased benefits. The type of partner that Corelight is looking for are VARs with a deep understanding of enterprise security.

“That’s because what Corelight does is largely complementary to a lot of the technology that our customers already have,” said Saldich.

The vendor wants partners in the enterprise data network and security space, as well as partners with expertise selling to the federal government and large academic or research institutions.

What Corelight does is provide, or illuminate, raw data about network traffic. The company offers three sensors — the AP 200, AP 1000, and AP 3000.

“We supply about 400 different elements of data about network traffic that can be used to understand attackers, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, who they are, what other things might be related to a particular incident — so we put out a very rich set of data,” Saldich explained.

The end user typically is a threat hunter and is looking at the data through an analytic platform such as Splunk, and doesn’t interact directly with the Corelight appliance, which sits in the network sending data to the security team.

“From a sales point of view, we’re not trying to displace or change the behavior of the customer. We’re adding an ingredient to the security stack that will make you and your team more effective — so they can keep on using all the stuff that they’re already using and like,” said Saldich.

Partners make money in the form of discounts. The product is sold as a subscription; tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, per box, for example. Larger customers have deployed 10, 20 and more devices, and Saldich expects …

… to see customers deploying up to 100 appliances.

Managed security service providers (MSSPs) aren’t a part of the partner program, but Corelight is discussing the opportunity with MSSPs and believes they have a big role to play.

“Corelight’s product is very complementary to a lot of the things that MSSPs already provide, such as firewalls, intrusion detection or incidence response, or digital forensics,” the CMO said.

He suggests that not only could MSSPs offer the appliance to clients, but also use it to make their own operations much more efficient.

“Corelight is quickly becoming the definitive tool used by enterprises across all verticals to make sense of their network traffic in real time,” said Greg Bell, CEO of Corelight. “We aim to build meaningful mutual relationships with new partners that share our laser-focused mission — to make the world’s networks safer. We do that by helping our customers access the right security-relevant data at the right time.”