I joined Balbix to Fuel Explosive Growth Through a Partner Ecosystem

I recently joined Balbix as VP Strategic Alliances and Channels. In my experience working with CIOs and CISOs of Fortune 500 organizations I’ve realized that they face a number of similar challenges in cyber risk management:

• They lack accurate visibility of the assets and applications that make up their enterprise
• They struggle to quantify cyber risk, making it difficult to make the right decisions or to demonstrate the effectiveness of their infosec programs
• They wrestle with not having context and insights to find and mitigate critical vulnerabilities on exposed assets before they can be exploited by attackers, even though significant effort is wasted in patching activities

Most of these security leaders have plenty of tools at their disposal. Indeed, they have mountains of data, especially in more mature programs. But, they don’t have the actionable insights needed to improve their cybersecurity posture and decrease cyber risk. Vulnerability and cyber risk management in most enterprises remains a brute force, mostly manual, ad-hoc and incomplete (from a coverage standpoint) exercise. Recent high profile vulnerabilities, like Log4shell and Spring4shell, have exposed a gap between the speed at which new security vulnerabilities emerge and the speed at which enterprises can mitigate such risks.

I got excited as I learned that Balbix has addressed these problems for Fortune 100 customers: some of the biggest names in the telecommunications, healthcare and banking verticals. For these leading organizations, Balbix is being used as the brain of their cybersecurity posture program, enabling their security controls (the muscles) to work better together. Another thing that attracted me was that Balbix is a SaaS application, making it easy to deploy, manage and scale (one customer is using Balbix to monitor and manage just under 1 million on-prem and cloud assets). Balbix’s benefits are goodness for both the end user and for partners supporting those customers.

For these reasons, and more, I joined Balbix to fuel continued explosive growth (Balbix grew 2.5X last year).

Today, Balbix already works with dozens of partners around the world. My focus is to help Balbix build out its partner ecosystem to replicate its success stories amongst the world’s leading enterprises. There is a great opportunity to create broad, turnkey solutions that combine the Balbix Security Cloud with partners’ services and technologies. Balbix easily fits into a partner ecosystem to address the pain points and challenges I outlined above.

GTM partnerships: delivering 50 percent of revenue 

Balbix is a global company. I’m looking to proactively partner with global system integrators (GSIs); managed security service providers (MSSPs) and value added resellers (VARs) to grow our business around the world. I’m also looking for distributors in the Middle East, the Asia Pacific and Latin America.

Partners are already contributing significantly to Balbix’s revenues. As we work on expanding Balbix’s partner network and strategically engage with our existing and new partners, we plan to have 50 percent of Balbix revenue coming through the partners ecosystem. Balbix will also help our partners:

• Be trusted advisors that deliver transformational initiatives enabled by the Balbix Security Cloud.
• Deliver security services that complement the existing services they provide based on EDR, SOC, SIEM and newer MDR (managed detection and response) offerings. Using the same data sources, they can extend their portfolios with innovative and easy to deploy services for Cyber Asset and Attack Surface Management, Risk-Based Vulnerability Management and Cyber Risk Quantification.
• Efficiently transact and deliver their specialized services alongside a Balbix deployment.

Creating win-win models

I have created hugely successful and rewarding win-win models for partners. My successful track-record comes from a unique blend of experience selling into global enterprises and telecom operators, working at a GSI selling technology solutions (17 years with Tech Mahindra), partnering with technology vendors and selling cybersecurity technology with GSIs/VARs/MSSPs into large global enterprises (4.5 years with Virsec Systems). This experience gives me a good perspective on the unique strengths that our partners bring to the table and how Balbix can create successful partnerships through a partner enablement framework.

I look forward to solving critical customer problems with our partner ecosystem for global enterprise customers. I’m very excited about my role as it focuses on creating new revenue streams, new markets, and partnerships to fuel continued explosive growth for Balbix.