Steve Harper, StillSecure's VP of business development, talked to the WHIR about the XO deal
(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — Last month, managed network security firm StillSecure (www.stillsecure.com) announced a reseller partnership with communications firm XO Communications (www.xo.com), through which XO would provide StillSecure’s managed security products to its business customers.
The announcement included comments from XO on the deal, and the value in moving security services into the cloud, both as extension of the selection of services available to its customers, and as a furthering of its own cloud-based service delivery strategy.
StillSecure says the XO deal is exciting, given the size and scope of the new partner’s customer base, but a lot like most of the company’s existing reseller relationships in terms of its general parameters. However, the company says there’s an opportunity for some customization of each individual reseller relationship to reflect that company’s needs.
In an email interview with the Web Host Industry Review, StillSecure’s vice president of business development discusses some of the details of the company’s new relationship with XO Communications, StillSecure’s reseller partner program in general and the company’s philosophy around delivering network security services from “in the cloud.”
WHIR: Let’s start by characterizing the partnership here, and the delivery of the services. Is XO delivering StillSecure’s network security solutions alongside its own? Are those services more connected to XO’s hosting services, or is it something the company is providing alongside telco-type solutions to support customers’ internal IT deployments?
Steve Harper: XO is utilizing StillSecure’s managed security services and delivering them to its telco and hosting customers. XO’s vision is impressive – they are essentially saying to their customers and prospects that we’ll deal with security before the traffic even gets to you – we’ll deal with it in the cloud. No need to put equipment, people, and resources on-site – we’ll just deliver “clean pipes” to you. So, we’ll provide you with Internet connectivity, multiprotocol label switching capabilities, hosting and colocation, and now managed security if you need it. That’s an impressive offering from a company that has a fantastic customer base and deep channel to the market. StillSecure is XO’s managed security services partner. Our Security Operations Centers are continuously monitoring, managing, and defending the customers who select their managed security offerings.
WHIR: Can you describe specifically what range of StillSecure services that XO will be offering? What kind of percentage or part of your overall offerings does it represent?
SH: StillSecure is providing XO with several core offerings, including managed firewall, intrusion detection/prevention, VPN, and web/content filtering. We expect to greatly expand this list as XO’s customers continue to drill deeper into the security stack.
WHIR: How unique a partnership is this, outside the potential in the sheer size of XO’s customer base? In terms of the style and terms of the arrangement, how similar is it to a deal another hosting provider might expect to strike with StillSecure?
SH: Our partnership with XO is similar to existing partnerships with hosting providers, but as with many of our relationships – it is tailored to their business needs and requirements. On the scale of lightly integrated partners to tightly integrated, XO definitely falls into the tightly integrated – from a technology standpoint as well as sales and marketing. Our joint goal was to provide a seamless XO customer experience. We’ve worked closely with XO to ensure the customer on-boarding process is smooth and fits with their existing provisioning processes and model. We’ve also worked hard to ensure the security incident escalation processes are smooth and, as a result, provide customers with a great experience. Similar to other significant relationships that we have – such as Peak10, ViaWest, CoreSite, and many others, we work very closely with partners up-front to ensure that the model makes sense for both organizations. Consequently, there are some things that end up being more or less standard and some that end up being dependent upon the partner’s business model.
WHIR: Judging by the material on your website, the partner program is a considerable part of how StillSecure sets out to do business. What kinds of support do you offer for partners/resellers outside of the security services themselves?
SH: StillSecure has a differentiated approach to the market in our industry segment. This approach is helping us to not only win a large number of deals but it is also allowing StillSecure to be “designed in” to our partners’ solutions. Our approach with all service provider partners is to do as much of the heavy lifting as we can. We have built deep internal capabilities to help our partners with their entire product delivery lifecycle and have experts who will help with the definition of the offerings, the engineering process, the provisioning and deployment models, customer support, and finally, the go-to-market plan. Our model is a success-based model – we win when our partners win.
WHIR: In your press release you describe StillSecure’s services as “in the cloud,” and “the next level for forward-thinking telcos.” In most cases, what are your products replacing, as far as the end user’s network security is concerned?
SH: Our hypothesis is that customers need a complete layered security approach. For small to medium sized businesses, if they’re budgeting and researching what point product to deploy, the chances of this customer achieving real security is slim. For enterprises, they have so many priorities that while they could allocate them to security, it simply wouldn’t be strategic or core to their business. StillSecure provides the complete package with all necessary layers to security in one service. Ultimately the benefit to the customer is that they are able to achieve a higher level of security or compliance per dollar expended than if they did it themselves. Long term, our belief is that this is how security will be consumed, as a managed service, and partners like XO are very well positioned to provide this dimension of added value to their customers.
WHIR: The XO deal is a couple weeks old at this point. What kind of traction are you seeing among the company’s customers?
SH: We’ve been incredibly impressed with XO’s sales and marketing delivery. We just announced our agreement a couple of weeks ago and among a number of deals that have closed since that time are two of XO’s largest customers. We think that this speaks to three issues – one, the pent up demand for this service within XO’s customer base; two, the quick assimilation of the service within XO’s sales and marketing organizations; and, three – the flexibility and versatility of StillSecure’s network security services.
XO clearly has a very serious team focused on taking their business to the next level and we are excited to help them drive significant adoption within their customer base.
About Liam Eagle
Liam Eagle has worked as a contributor to the Web Host Industry Review since its inception in 2000, and as editor since 2003. He has been editor of the WHIR's print magazine since its launch. His daily involvement in the gathering and reporting of Web hosting news and his regular interaction with Web hosting leaders gives him an uncommonly broad appreciation of the issues and tends facing the business. Through his WHIR blog, Liam spots Web hosting trends and offers opinions on the industry-wide impacts of major developments and the motivation behind big announcements. Follow him on Twitter @liameagle
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