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WhiteHat Security on Wednesday unveiled its new Partner Network program that offers predictable margins, and is built around its application security platform with services that span the entire software development life cycle.

WhiteHat Security’s John Atkinson

The program is designed for cybersecurity-focused partners who want to help customers secure their digital businesses by “securing the applications at the heart of the business.” Because its platform is software as a service, partners can deliver to their customers “fast time-to-value,” and benefit from the ongoing subscription revenue inherent to cloud-based services, the company said.

John Atkinson, WhiteHat’s vice president of strategic alliances, tells Channel Partners this is a complete relaunch of its program, from contracts to margin, and engaging with its sales force.

“Notionally, we feel like WhiteHat should be driving about 65-75 percent of new business through our partners, but when we looked at the data, we could see that we weren’t even close to that target, largely because the company never really applied the right focus or commitment to building and sustaining a strong partner program,” he said. “But partners are essential to bringing application security services to market; we can’t do it alone. As a result, WhiteHat has now assembled a great channel and alliances team, and completely redesigned the partner program to ensure partners can be successful on all fronts.”

Partner input played a key role in the formulation of the new program as “we knew the revenue contribution that we were looking for our partners to deliver, but you can’t start there,” Atkinson said.

“Instead you have to start with the partners, and see what it is that would drive them to position WhiteHat to their customers, rather than a competing technology,” he said. “What I heard is that they wanted a program that was simple, profitable for them, and most of all, demonstrated a level of commitment from WhiteHat Security. This input led to a complete change in our contracting process, a functional discounting model so partners know their margin and pricing upfront, and a compensation model that drives our reps to work more closely with our partners.”

WhiteHat also has invested in developing a new partner portal. Powered by Webinfinity, it provides content subscription services for access to new sales-enablement material, and is fully integrated with Salesforce.com to deliver real-time deal registration and visibility into all deals in process.

GreenPages’ Jay Keating

“We find that most of our partners have some security offerings – firewalls, endpoint protection, etc. – but when you look at some of the recent large security breaches, these are happening through web applications,” Atkinson said. “With WhiteHat’s SaaS deployment model, it makes it easy for our partners to add our service to their portfolio, and by extension, help their customers secure their web and mobile applications.”

GreenPages Technology Solutions is partnering with WhiteHat for resale, and it will offer WhiteHat’s service to its managed-services customers.

“As our customers’ interest in application security grows, adding a partner like WhiteHat Security becomes increasingly important,” said Jay Keating, GreenPages’ senior vice president of managed services. “WhiteHat is unique in that they are a service and not just a tool, and complement our professional and managed services delivery models.”

WhiteHat’s partner program currently is focused on North America and EMEA.