For the second year in a row, David Wagner, Vice President of Securonix Global MSSP Business has been named to CRN’s 2022 Channel Chiefs list, which highlights top IT channel vendor executives who continually demonstrate expertise, influence, and innovation in channel leadership.
David joined Securonix three years ago and has had dramatic success, most recently launching Securonix Fuel, our new MSSP and MDR program. Since the 2020 launch of the program, Securonix has hit 240% year-over-year MSSP bookings growth and added more than 75 new partners and 450 customers from over 15 countries.
Keys to MSSP Success
David has a philosophy he feels is at the root of success for managed security service providers at Securonix. “I designed the MSSP program to eliminate every possible barrier to entry,” says Wagner, “with the goal to move an MSSP partner towards self-sufficiency as fast as possible.”
For example, the MSSP program qualifies candidates but uses guidelines and the requirements are not “set in stone” as he puts it. Once qualified, the candidate pays no program fee ever or training fees for a year. “We give them free professional services assistance for the first two customers and multiple log sources and mentor the MSSP personnel to make sure they get started off on the right foot,” says Wagner. The program also provides free professional services to help MSSPs adopt Securonix and train them in the more than 3,000 use cases that MSSPs can use to transition customers.
“One MSSP had 252 use cases among their customers. Securonix’s MSSP program was able to get them up and running in less than two weeks,” says Wagner.
The program assigns each MSSP a customer success manager who meets with them weekly and an assigned MSSP leader who meets with them every quarter for a business review of how things are going, how business can be improved, and how Securonix can help. And finally, the program provides competitive pricing based on the customer’s region and other factors.
Passionate About Securonix
Aside from the philosophy of the MSSP program, David attributes MSSP success to the quality of the Securonix offering, which he is passionate about. “Securonix takes a world-class, market-leading UEBA solution and merges it with a security data lake, SIEM, log management, SOAR, threat analytics, and premium vertical applications to create a true next-generation SIEM,” he says. “It’s a complete end-to-end platform.”
Wagner points out that Securonix broke into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for SIEM in 2018 and already sits far to the right in its ability to deliver and innovate. The company also continues to move up every year in global ability to execute. “We’ve been ranked number one in the Gartner Critical Capabilities matrix for every single component you’d want from an advanced SIEM,” says Wagner.
Aside from features, Securonix’s cloud-native, multi-tenant architecture hosted in the cloud by Securonix makes all the difference for MSSPs in Wagner’s perspective. “We’ve taken away 90% of the heavy lifting,” says Wagner. “We buy the hardware, we have the software and the analytics, and we manage all of it. The MSSP trains the SOC analysts to use the product and the engineers to learn how to set up a log collector and away you go! And Securonix scales better than anyone else.”
As for cloud analytics, “We have no peer,“ says Wagner. “Securonix understands normal and finds ‘weird’ (abnormal) better than anyone, especially when we get the identity and access information, not just an IP address. We understand if weird is something to be concerned about because we map all events to the MITRE ATT&CK framework.” This strategy reduces false positives significantly. Searches are also lighting quick because Securonix tags and enriches data as it comes in, at ingestion. “We’ve heard that MSSP SOC analysts become anywhere from 3 or more times more productive with us, which means value for our partners.”
Wagner is very optimistic about the next few years. “We’re rolling out more innovations this year and I expect us to deliver more competitive advantages to our partners and customers.”