In an effort to move towards a more channel-friendly sales model, Awareness Technologies, a unified internal threat protection vendor, has hired former MX Logic channel executive Ken Totura as its new channel chief.
Totura, who was hired at Los Angeles, Calif.-based Awareness Technologies last month as the company’s first-ever chief channel officer, has spent the past 27 years working in the IT industry and with the channel.
Prior to Awareness Technologies, Totura worked at e-mail and Web defense managed service provider MX Logic as the company’s vice-president of channel sales. That company was acquired last fall by McAfee. In addition to MX Logic, Totura also worked at Vericept Corporation, a DLP (data loss prevention) software provider, as the director of partner development.
In his new role with Awareness Technologies, Totura said he’s now tasked with building up a channel for the company which, up until now, has mainly done business direct.
“The vast majority of our revenue is direct and in the 90s (per cent range),” he explained. “My goal is to flip flop that and I feel that we’ll do that. My first milestone will be to get 25 per cent of or sales through the channel by the end of the year.”
To do this, Totura, who is based in Denver, said he’s starting to aggressively recruit partners in both the U.S. and Canada. While the company currently has relationships with a handful of partners, three of which are from Canada, Totura said his goal is sign on 19 more partners before the end of the year.
“Before I came along, the company was receiving inquiries from partners and they only had a simple construct of a program, sort of like a one-size-fits-all,” Totura said. “Now we’re building a program where we’re creating channel categories around a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-ready model.”
Depending on how involved the partner wants to be and how much work they’d like to do with customers, Totura said there are three categories of SaaS partners.
“For SaaS 1, some partners will want us to do the end-customer billing and have us also do the technical support,” he said. “For SaaS 2, partners handle the billing on a monthly basis and lastly, for partners who are classified as being SaaS 3 partners, they do all of the selling, billing and support.”
Depending on the category of the channel partner, Totura said partners can expect to make between 30 and 40 points of margin on Awareness Technologies’ Interguard unified internal threat protection solution.
Interguard is a single console solution that’s made up of four different products, which the company refers to as services. Totura said the value proposition with the Interguard solution is that usually, solutions such as DLP and employee monitoring are too expensive or complicated for even the smallest businesses to use. Because the solution is deployed and consumed using a SaaS model, businesses pay on a monthly basis, which also translates to steady and recurring revenues for the partner, he added. The four different services which are built into Interguard include DLP, Web filtering, laptop recover and employee monitoring.
The solution works well for SMB customers all the way up to enterprise businesses, Totura explains.
“The value proposition for partners is that we’re easy to do business with, partners can make recurring revenues and the speed to revenue is attractive because of our SaaS form-factor, which works through a single console to bring DLP and Internet monitoring software solutions to the SMB and enterprise markets,” Totura said.
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