Ordr, an IoT security company, on Tuesday said it is expanding and formalizing its global partner program. In doing so, the company creates more ways for partners to make money with the channel-focused startup.

Founded in 2015 by former Aruba executives, Ordr early on understood the value of growing with partners.

Ordr’s Greg Murphy

“From the outset we knew we needed to be a channel-first company,” Greg Murphy, president and CEO, told Channel Futures. “I saw that from my years of work at Aruba. Getting the understanding of how channel partners give you breadth, but also bring the expertise to enable organizations to successfully absorb and use solutions such as ours.”

Murphy refers to the Ordr Systems Control Engine (SCE), an actionable AI-based systems control engine for the hyperconnected enterprise. Ordr SCE, which debuted last fall, identifies and classifies devices in the environment. It regulates device flow and behavior, and delivers closed loop security. And, Ordr SCE provides businesses with system utilization.

The IoT security company addresses the challenge of unmanaged IoT and OT devices connected in the enterprise. These devices include things such as building systems, connected medical devices, and manufacturing infrastructure. Also, many devices that are unfamiliar to the organization, they don’t know what to do with and have a hard time protecting them.

Channel Investment

Eric Berkman, a channel veteran with ties to Cisco, OpenDNS and Citrix, joined Ordr as senior director of worldwide channel in October. Berkman is responsible for expanding the company’s global, and invitation-only, partner program.

“We want to work and focus on partners that can bring best-of-breed capabilities and expertise with our solution.” said Berkman. “A lot of times, channel programs are one-size-fits-all. We’re a dynamic startup organization with a channel-first model and our partner program has a lot of flexible choices.”

What that means is doing what’s best for the partners. So the program supports referral selling, authorized resellers, assessment partners and MSPs.

Strategic growth of the partner program is in terms of regions and verticals. In North America, Ordr is building pipeline with between 20 and 40 partners in a given quarter.

Partner Fit

The IoT security company is interested in partners that have made investments in cybersecurity, as well as strong networking experts.

“Partners with strong networking expertise with companies like HPE, Juniper or Cisco absolutely understand how the network is being asked to do more from a security context. They also have more visibility and awareness that more devices are being asked to traverse the network they’re managing and maintaining — and what that means to them,” said Berkman.

Additionally, Ordr looks for partners who have made investments in verticals such as industrial IoT and health care infrastructure, where there are a lot of IoT devices. Ordr industry solutions include health care, hospitality, enterprise, government, tech manufacturing, retail and transportation.

Ordr offers partners ongoing technical and sales training, joint solution development and selling, multivendor infrastructure integrations and field marketing support. Channel support also includes plug-and-play demo kits, joint sales and marketing, account protection and referral compensation. Additionally, the program offers a chance for partners to become Ordr professional services subcontractors.

Assessment Partners

What is an assessment partner?

According to Berkman, some partners are doing assessments around network segmentation specific to IoT using Ordr technology in that process. Other partners focus on an IoT message around discovery.

“That looks at the IoT devices a company has today and how they’re forecasting growth for the next 24-36 months. Also, they’re having a conversation about beginning the process of taking inventory and how to start protecting and maximizing the devices in the environment,” he explained.

Ordr makes its software available so partners can wrap it into their service offerings. Assessment is often the first phase of giving a customer visibility into what they haven’t seen before.

“The assessment of risk leads to a strategy conversation about products a customer needs and how to operationally implement that strategy,” said Murphy. ‘That’s a real value-added service for partners to bring.”

Partners need to know that Ordr understands the need to work with existing security and network infrastructure tools.

“As we are grabbing information across the network in a passive, agentless manner, we use machine learning to understand what the device is doing. When we integrate with the switch, firewalls and network access control tools – made by Aruba, Cisco, etc. – we’re automatically building and generating policies that those tools operate in. Those policies get ingested into the existing infrastructure. We utilize the existing daily tools of the organization,” said Berkman.

The company also has integrations into ServiceNow and Nuvolo.