Cloud infrastructure security provider Dome9 Security has launched its first channel program, to be led by Jim Sortino, who recently was hired as vice president of worldwide sales and operations.

Sortino tells Channel Partners the Cloud Protection Partner Program is the company’s first formalized partner program, though it has had technology and go-to-market partners in the past. The new program was created to bring on additional partners to accelerate global market expansion, he said.

Before joining Dome9, Sortino held sales leadership positions at Application Security and Entrust.

“With the creation of three modules that address the top three critical issues in implementing a secure cloud infrastructure, Dome9 became a critical part of large enterprises’ infrastructure,” Sortino said. “As such, the need to engage the reseller network was paramount. The Dome9 Cloud Protection Partner Program provides structure to the relationship between Dome9 and its channel partners, and clarifies incentives (margins and discounts), enablement and engagement model with different types of partners.”

Dome9 is seeing strong traction in the enterprise market across a variety of industries, including financial services, health care, technology and technology-enabled services, he said. Customers include Proofpoint, Apigee, Virgin Pulse, Pacific Life, Citrix, Cadence and Aon, he said.

“The new program is integral to Dome9’s overall channel strategy,” Sortino said. “Our sales to date have been largely through direct and inbound efforts, but the goal is to ramp our engagement with channel partners. Dome9 is targeting managed service providers (MSPs) and resellers primarily in North America, as well as channel distributors in EMEA and ANZ (Australia-New Zealand).”{ad}

Dome9 is building a channel community to continue to meet the needs of enterprise customers running workloads in public cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), according to the company.

“The customer base for public cloud services is shifting from early adopters and software developers who build and manage their own tools for security and analytics, to enterprises running mission-critical workloads,” Sortino said. “Enterprises are looking for managed services and platforms that they can use, especially in the security realm. This will create a massive business opportunity around providing enterprise-class managed services on top of one or more public cloud services catering to our customers.”

Dome9 also has signed a partnership agreement with Westcon-Comstor to continue its global expansion into the enterprise market. The partnership allows Westcon-Comstor to distribute the Dome9 Arc offering for network security, privileged account management, and compliance and governance to resellers globally under its brand.