Fortscale’s New Channel Chief On Embracing Partners, Pushing User Behavior Analytics

data analytics, user behavior analytics

Fortscale is one of the larger startups looking to capitalize on a growing trend in the security market for user behavior analytics (UBA) technologies. With several Fortune 2000 clients signed up and $16 million in new venture capital funding, the Israeli security startup is ready to dive headfirst into the channel. That push started with the November appointment of Avi Legmann as senior vice president of business and corporate development. Legmann was charged with helping Fortscale transform its go-to-market from a direct to a channel-first approach.

In an interview with IT Best of Breed, Legmann discusses how the company plans to invest in its channel, and why partners can benefit from bringing a UBA solution into their portfolios.  

Q: What trends are you seeing the UBA space?

LEGMANN: There is this hype, and the hype says UBA is very hot … It’s coming from the fact that people realize that users are critical when you are coming in to investigate any incident … My prediction is we will be coming into the RSA Conference, or a little after RSA, and there will be about 10 to 20 companies and all of them will mention UBA. I think that the fact that UBA is becoming hot and recognizable creates a momentum as well as a hype in the UBA space. It is very interesting.

I think that the market is still learning how to best practice and use UBA technology to help their analysts. We’ve seen people jumping in and deploying it worldwide and we think this is a good indication … The last part about UBA that I’m going to say is that we believe that UBA will be an essential part of people that are today doing something in the neighborhood, people like the SIEM (security information and event management) vendors, people that are trying to capture this last part of what they are missing from their solution … think that there are a couple of other technologies in the space that are in the neighborhood that they will have to either by or build UBA as an augmentation to what they have today.

What did Fortscale’s channel program look like when you joined the company?

We are revamping on sales. This year is a challenging year for us because we are going through a round of funding as well. There is a really an early stage of setting up some channels, but it is really not anything meaningful that I can report on. The plans going forward are into channels. We will be a channel company. I can tell you that we have many channels. We have about one and the plan is to extend it as an extensive area of sales this year.

When you think about an Israeli startup in an early stage, like where Fortscale is, the main thread is to acquire meaningful customers for proofing the market and proving the technology works and really make the market right. For that, the company used a direct sales approach to the large enterprise. I think that me coming on board to start building the team, including the sales team, this is where we actually start moving into a channel strategy.

What type of channel partners are well-suited for Fortscale and the user behavior analytics space?

We are looking for two types of channels that will help us get into the enterprise customers…One is looking at the nationwide, the larger resellers, the Optiv and Forsythe-type companies, as well as starting to align with some local, regional ones…The second angle to my job is to build the partnerships within the ecosystem, which probably will result into some OEM relationships as well … I think that we are part of a larger ecosystem … We need to work with them very tightly. What we need to do together is orchestrate better visibility to the analyst, who can take action to remediate…

I don’t foresee having 20 to 60 channel partners in 2016. I foresee about five to seven. We are looking into some of the big ones, such as Optiv and Forsythe. We haven’t signed anyone yet, but those are the channel allies that we are looking for. Then, we are looking for some smaller ones.