Securonix Aims To Ramp Up Partner Efforts Under New Channel Chief

The SIEM provider plans to double down on working with partners following the recent hire of Mark Stevens as SVP of channels and alliances.

Securonix Channel Chief Mark Stevens

Securonix plans to scale up its partner program as the cybersecurity unicorn seeks to accelerate its growth in the market for next-generation SIEM, the company’s CEO and recently appointed channel chief told CRN.

CEO Nayaki Nayyar and Mark Stevens, who joined Securonix in early October as channel chief, said in the first interviews since Stevens’ appointment that channel partners will be increasingly central to the company’s growth strategy going forward.

“That’s going to be a big growth vector for us,” Nayyar said.

[Related: New Securonix CEO Nayaki Nayyar Vows Close Relationship With Channel]

The company raised $1 billion in funding in early 2022 to fund its expansion in next-gen SIEM (security information and event management). Nayyar, who formerly served as president at cybersecurity vendor Ivanti, joined Securonix as CEO in December 2022.

Nayyar said her top priority in her first year was to solidify the company’s product offerings, which led to the release of the Securonix Unified Defense SIEM earlier this year.

Now, Nayyar and Stevens said the timing is ideal for Securonix to ramp up its work with partners.

“This is absolutely a growth area for us,” said Stevens, who had previously worked with Nayyar at Ivanti. “Being partner-friendly and channel centric — there’s a lot of different ways that we can support that effort.”

Securonix currently has “over 100” channel partners, and plans to significantly add to that number, he said. Additionally, Securonix has intentions to begin working with distributors for the first time, executives said.

Stevens, whose title at Securonix is senior vice president of channels and alliances, had most recently served as Ivanti’s global senior vice president for strategic alliances and OEM.

The channel push at Securonix comes amid intensifying competition in the SIEM market — with Cisco, for instance, planning to acquire SIEM stalwart Splunk for $28 billion to boost its cybersecurity platform. Meanwhile, security vendors that started in other areas of the market — such as Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Microsoft — are reporting massive traction after expanding into SIEM.

Founded in 2008, Securonix has specialized in capabilities for stopping insider threats — known as UEBA (user and entity behavior analytics) — which has helped to differentiate its platform over the years, executives said.

Today, however, the Securonix platform is highly differentiated through “our ability to deliver a cloud platform that incorporates SIEM, UEBA, SOAR,” Stevens said. “And we’re extending on that runway with additional modules and products.”

Securonix’s technology is a huge advantage that enables the vendor to stand out in the crowded SIEM market, said Khiro Mishra, founder and CEO of Cybalt, an MSSP and Securonix partner based in Plano, Texas.

The company “pioneered” UEBA and has a major leg-up over older SIEM providers by building a cloud-native platform from the get-go, Mishra said.

“Some SIEM platforms migrated to cloud, but some are designed in cloud. The ones which are designed for cloud, and designed in cloud, have more significance to the problems that we have to solve now,” he said. “So I would say Securonix has definitely stood out, and continues to bring the futuristic view on where the market is going and how to architect for that.”

Mishra particularly applauded Nayyar’s “product-centric” approach since joining as CEO.

“If the platform does not evolve, then we as partners will not be able to [provide] what customers are looking for,” he said. “I think [Nayyar] gets that.”

Mishra also said he believes Stevens has gotten off to a good start in terms of driving the company’s increased focus on partners. For instance, Stevens has been highly interested in collaborating with the Cybalt team around growth strategies and how to proactively plan for targeting particular segments of the market, according to Mishra.

“That’s a refreshing change,” he said.

In terms of working with MSSPs, there’s no question that “we’re extending that out and building that” right now at Securonix, Stevens said.

Key to that opportunity is Securonix’s move to build on top of Snowflake’s data lake, which better accommodates the massive volumes of security-relevant data that modern organizations are dealing with, according to the executives.

“The partnership with Snowflake allows us to go forward and do some really unique things with our MSSP partners and other channel partners,” Stevens said.

Overall at Securonix, “we have pretty big plans for where we want to take this entire partner program,” Nayyar said.