New eEye Exec Changes Its Channel

Partners said that Brown, who became COO of the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based network security vendor in September, already has marshaled more channel support into the field. Brown reinvigorated Citrix&'s channel program during his three-year tenure there, expanding rebate and incentive programs and upping rewards for top resellers.

“The changes to [eEye&'s] channel have already been huge,” said Paul Graffeo, co-founder and vice president of sales and marketing at Red Bull Technologies, a solution provider in Atlanta.

Earlier this month, eEye introduced version 3.0 of its REM Security Management console, the first product announcement under Brown&'s tenure.

REM 3.0 does a better job of organizing security data collected by eEye&'s two primary security products, Retina and Blink, said Mike Puterbaugh, senior director of product marketing at eEye. Retina performs over 1,700 vulnerability audits on a network and generates mountains of data, which can be intimidating if not organized properly, he said.

Blink is eEye&'s network-behavior-triggered attack prevention product.

Both eEye products feed in a collaborative fashion into REM 3.0, which has been improved to display security information grouped together by common device, Puterbaugh said. The upgrade is included with customers&' current maintenance fees, he said.

“When you start to create daily scans with Retina you are going to create a lot of data, and in the past, it has been easy to start to lose context of what all the data really means,” Puterbaugh said. “So we went from a laundry-list approach to reporting to more of an asset-level approach.”

To eEye&'s reseller partners, Brown said expect changes to the vendor&'s channel program in January that will make selling its security products “much more lucrative.”

Some of the changes to the partner program will come in the way deal registration is rewarded, Brown said, referring to similar changes he made at Citrix three years ago as evidence that his plan for eEye will work. The company also will add a new distribution partner within weeks and will use its expanded distribution channel to recruit new solution provider partners, he said.

Brown said he has reassigned eEye&'s telemarketing organization to a group that focuses more on telephone-based partner sales support. Currently, eEye has only about 20 partners that Brown would call “truly productive,” and he wants to see that number increase to about 250 a year from now. “What&'s been missing [at eEye] is a full-on press with the channel,” he said.

Already, Brown has made changes at eEye which make the vendor more competitive, said Red Bull&'s Graffeo.

An eEye reseller for about the past three years, Red Bull is essentially located “in the backyard” of one of eEye&'s fiercest competitors, Internet Security Systems (ISS), Graffeo said.

But under Brown, eEye has already stepped up with more field and marketing support for Red Bull, helping the company to maintain traction for eEye products in ISS territory, Graffeo said.

But more work still needs to be done, said Frank Darden, CTO and president of Mission Critical Systems, a security VAR and eEye partner based in Pompano Beach, Fla.

Darden said he is happy with the increase in channel support he has witnessed under Brown. But eEye is not as recognized a player in the security market as much as competitors such as Atlanta-based ISS, so a more aggressive marketing effort from eEye would be helpful, Darden said. “We still have to explain to some customers who eEye is,” he said.