Q&A With Devo’s Channel Chief on Making the CRN Cloud 100 and What’s Ahead for Partners

Gary Pelczar leads global alliances for Devo and is responsible for defining and executing Devo’s strategy for growing the company’s channel sales. For the second year in a row, he has been named a  Channel Chief by CRN, which recognizes influential leaders who drive the channel agenda and evangelize the importance of channel partnerships. In this post Gary shares his thoughts about the growth of Devo Drive, the importance of partners worldwide, and what’s ahead.

What does it mean to be named a Channel Chief by CRN?

Gary: Earning the top industry accolade in back-to-back years is a great honor. It’s another proof point that Devo’s partner program is on its way and is a critical part of the company’s global growth strategy. I’m fortunate to have a hard-working team to support and promote our partner program, which helps differentiate Devo in a crowded market. More and more top channel organizations want to work with us to make our technology an integral component of their cloud transformation efforts. The goal remains the same: to build strong relationships and work together to best meet customer needs. The rest takes care of itself.

What’s different about Devo’s approach to the channel?

Gary: It’s been a year since we launched Devo Drive, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive from resellers, MSSPs and systems integrators. What’s unique is that we address both transitioning data to the cloud and successfully keeping it available and secure, which appeals to both regional and larger partners. Many channel organizations today face a big challenge, which is moving workloads to the cloud and dealing with the related security constraints and requirements. The Devo Platform excels at those critical tasks, which sets us apart from other security analytics platforms. Our cloud delivery model is a new dynamic for the security analytics and SIEM space. That’s why CRN named Devo to The 20 Coolest Cloud Monitoring And Management Companies Of The 2023 Cloud 100 for innovation and industry leadership.

How is the Devo Partner Program set up?

Gary: The Devo Drive partner program consists of three tiers—Silver, Gold and Platinum. The program offers competitive partner discounts and margins and protected deal registration across the board. It’s very inclusive and partner onboarding covers enablement, sales training, technical training, and joint marketing. Pre-sales support from Devo solutions architects is also available to help ensure customer success. It’s really ideal to allow reseller partners to target Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 enterprises across all industry verticals such as financial services, telecommunications and retail. And it allows our MSSP partners to target those customers that need some degree of a managed service.

What’s Devo’s appeal to partners servicing enterprise customers?

Gary: Enterprises across the globe are moving away from legacy logging and SIEM solutions because of all the maintenance and obsolescence of on-premises analytics and security solutions. For those partners accustomed to deploying legacy solutions, they can now focus their energy on offering higher value services focused on specific security outcomes. In particular, it’s critical that MXDR and MDR providers look at new technology because being responsible for setting up, maintaining and servicing legacy solutions is not core to their business. That’s where we come in. Using Devo and our cloud-native SaaS offering lets our resellers and managed security service partners focus all of their investments on the outcome side of their business instead of the operational side. By using the capabilities of Devo, our partners can focus on delivering the outcomes that their enterprise customers expect.

What’s new this year and how has the channel responded overall?

Gary: Last year we started operationalizing partnerships worldwide with sales and technical enablement. The program was immediately popular with smaller, regional partners, the kind of companies that lean forward and are looking for disruptive technology. We made great progress working together with partners to jointly pursue and win new accounts. Since then, we’ve broadened our focus and commitment to appeal to larger partners that are looking to build an incubation team within their organization using next-generation technologies and solutions. We’re also taking a long-term approach by defining what each partnership is from a strategic level and making the necessary adjustments to ensure we capture the full value of each partnership.

Many service providers are discovering that the home-grown or third-party solutions they’re using are just not scalable and the cost is not predictable enough for them to really grow their business. So those service providers are becoming Devo Drive partners. We’ve seen 42% year-over-year growth in deal registrations, with 215% growth in January alone. And we’ve experienced higher win rates and faster close for deals with partners across the globe. It’s exciting to see the recognition we’re receiving from the managed service channel as we build more relationships with partners.

What’s ahead in 2023?

Gary: Devo is putting more resources behind supporting partners, including a significant increase in marketing investment alone this year. We’re also increasing our staff globally to help more partners onboard new clients and add new prospects in their sales funnels. We’re adding channel resources in APAC and EMEA as we grow those markets. We’re adding resources in the Public Sector as well to focus on the distinct business requirements of that market. And as we did in 2022, we’ll continue to expand our relationships with partners that provide and resell consulting services that leverage the Devo Platform, applications, and associated services to expand their businesses.