SANTA CLARA – WhiteHat Security, a provider of website security solutions, has announced the launch of its global partner program that will introduce two levels of partnership in order to deliver the WhiteHat Sentinel product family to the customers of consultants, resellers and managed security service providers.

The WhiteHat Security partner program gives organizations a turnkey solution to offer website security solutions, grow revenue and increase the value of their existing service offerings.

The two levels of the program are Resellers and Consultants. Partners at this level actually own the relationship with customers contractually. The second level is Referral partners and they don’t have the means to hold the contract either financially or don’t want to go through the legal agreements that need to be in place to do a web application assessment. WhiteHat will hold the paper and pay them a referral fee.

This formal program augments WhiteHat’s current partner activity, which includes alliances with leading security technology vendors such as F5 Networks and Breach Security and reseller organizations including Milestone Systems and AccessIT Group, among others.

According to Tom Foladare, WhiteHat director of business development, the company’s previous channel program focused on signing resellers but did not pass leads and the company found they were competing against the resellers that they were signing.

“Now what has happened is that resellers and consultants were finding that WhiteHat’s technology and methodology were doing website application security very efficiently and it made it more cost-effective to use a WhiteHat system than to do it themselves,” he said.

WhiteHat Security’s partner program provides organizations with access to the entire WhiteHat Sentinel product family of SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) website vulnerability management solutions. With WhiteHat Sentinel support, partners can effectively measure, monitor and manage website vulnerability remediation as part of a holistic approach to security. For their customers, this means access to the most comprehensive, timely and cost-effective way to gather and manage website vulnerability information.

In addition, depending on individual partner needs, WhiteHat Security will provide a comprehensive channel program to support partners, as well as a partner success path program; new customer opportunities through shared leads; recurring revenue model to provide sustained growth; and Trusted Advisor status leveraging the best web application security minds. Additionally, the program provides marketing events such as webinars and seminars, deal registration and dedicated people in the field that are doing nothing but working with partners

Foladare said the ideal resellers for the program are those that are interested in fixing vulnerabilities that are found during a web application security assessment rather than finding them.

“The amount of money that you can get for doing that is commoditizing, moving down and what we are looking for is resellers that say that is not the space to be in,” he explained. “We are looking for resellers that are making that shift from trying to make money finding vulnerabilities to making money in a market that won’t commoditize anytime soon, which is helping customers re-write custom code or putting web application firewalls to protect the vulnerabilities that are found.”

As well, because web application is a niche space, WhiteHat seeks resellers that have knowledge in web application security and not resellers that deal with network operations centers or security operation centers.

In addition, the WhiteHat Security partner program has been designed to provide technical and business support to a range of current and future partners, delivering benefits that will align with each partner’s business model.

Currently, there are about 10 to 15 partners are at each level and Foladare wants to grow the Reseller and Consultant level to about 25 partners by the end of this year. “We want to keep it small for this year and build off it. The market is changing so rapidly that we don’t want to bite off more than can chew.”

As well, as the program grows, WhiteHat will add additional structure to it throughout the year.

This column was written by Vanessa Ho of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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