Security Startup Marches Toward Channel Strategy

(Note: This story was originally posted on CRN.com July 29.)

StackPath, the still secretive security startup from SoftLayer founder Lance Crosby, made a splash last month upon emerging from stealth to reveal a massive initial funding round of $180 million.

Even before that public debut, StackPath was already selling a portfolio of four security services to more than 30,000 customers brought into its realm through three acquisitions. But the company, based in Dallas, hadn't engaged the channel in bringing those offerings to market.

That will change once another round of security products more geared toward the enterprise market is introduced to the portfolio either later this year or early next year, including a machine learning engine for performing threat detection, Chief Revenue Officer Steven Canale told CRN.

[Related: SoftLayer's Lance Crosby Calls It Quits With IBM]

As the product lineup swells with those enterprise-facing security services, the company expects to start building a channel and working with service providers and systems integrators, Canale said.

"Down the road, when we start deploying this machine learning engine that proactively detects threats and security concerns, that is something we feel the enterprise market is going to be much more interested in, and that’s something I see the channel really helps us get into," Canale said.

The startup isn't ready yet to discuss technologies in the pipeline beyond the machine learning engine. But it understands that "working with the channel is going to be more beneficial" than its current direct, mostly inside sales approach for bringing to market its existing batch of developer-oriented products, he told CRN.

StackPath also hasn't yet decided how it will obtain those enterprise products.

"Where we can acquire, we'll go that route," Canale said. "If it's not something we feel we can reasonably acquire, it's something we will build internally."

With its almost unprecedented stockpile of venture cash, StackPath has already completed three acquisitions to build its first product: a secure content delivery service.

But for all the publicity it's received due to the funding, acquisitions, and the name recognition of Crosby, who built SoftLayer into a cloud powerhouse and sold it to IBM in 2013, StackPath is still keeping a low profile—representatives answering the main phone line identified the company as MaxCDN, a Los Angeles-based content delivery network provider that StackPath acquired.