Devo Channel Chief on the Company’s Success, Making the CRN Security 100, and What’s Ahead

Gary Pelczar, Devo’s vice president of global alliances, has been named a 2022 Channel Chief by CRN. Gary and his team launched Devo Drive, the company’s partner program for resellers, MSSPs and global systems integrators in 2021. In this post Gary shares his thoughts about the growth of Devo Drive, the value Devo delivers to partners, and what lies ahead.

It’s a great honor to be named a Channel Chief by CRN. It recognizes that Devo is building a strong, diverse partner community and that top channel organizations want to work with us to make our technology an integral component of their cloud transformation efforts. Moving workloads to the cloud and dealing with the related security constraints and requirements is a new challenge for many channel organizations. They need the best solutions on the market, and that’s why the Devo Drive partner program is off to such a strong start.

Devo addresses both transitioning data to the cloud and successfully keeping it available and secure. The Devo Platform excels at those critical tasks. That innovation makes Devo a very attractive partner for MSSPs, resellers and global systems integrators, technology alliance partners, and professional services organizations. The recognition from CRN is really for the entire partner team and everyone at Devo.

Our cloud delivery model is a new dynamic for the security analytics and SIEM space. That’s why CRN named Devo one of the 20 Coolest Risk, Threat Intelligence and Security Operations Companies in its 2022 Security 100.

The Devo Approach to Partnership

When we launched Devo Drive, it was instantly popular with smaller, regional partners, the kind of companies that lean forward and are looking for disruptive technology. But we also appeal to larger partners that are looking to build an incubation team within their organization using next-generation technologies and solutions. For both types of partners, Devo fulfills their demand for cloud-native logging and security analytics.

In 2021 we began operationalizing those partnerships. We provided our partners with sales and technical enablement. We established a cadence by working together with partners to jointly pursue and win new accounts. This year we’re moving into a much more mature operational state where we can work collaboratively with our partners. Together, we’re defining what each partnership is from a strategic level, and then measuring success and making the necessary adjustments to ensure we capture the full value of each partnership.

Building a Foundation for Continued Partner Growth

As we mature in how we support and operate with partners we are attracting bigger partners some of which, frankly, were starting to lose opportunities to Devo. We want to focus on those relationships where there’s a strong commitment from both companies where we can plan, execute and measure ourselves over time.

Forming a partnership with Optiv is a key highlight of the first year of Devo Drive, especially because Optiv decided to launch its new MXDR service using Devo. As Optiv moves to a more service-focused business model, it aligns very well with Devo’s strengths — scale, performance and cost-effectiveness.

Our overall managed service business is growing rapidly. We always felt that Devo was well-suited to that model because of our multitenancy capabilities. We had great success in that space in 2021 because our managed services partners — like our enterprise customers —are reevaluating the technologies they’re using in their managed service business. Some service providers have built their own capabilities while others have been working with one or more vendors. But many of them 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. It’s exciting to see the recognition we’re receiving from the managed service channel as we build relationships with partners that are rapidly growing their business with Devo.

Devo’s Appeal to Partners

Enterprises have been moving away from legacy logging and SIEM solutions because of all the maintenance and obsolescence of on-premises data analytics and security solutions. It’s even more important for MXDR and MDR providers to do that as well because being responsible for setting up, maintaining and servicing legacy solutions is not core to their business. But using Devo and our cloud-native SaaS offering, enables our managed security service partners to focus all of their investment on the outcome side of their business, rather than the operational side. By leveraging the capabilities of Devo our partners can focus on delivering the outcomes their enterprise customers expect.

What’s Ahead in 2022

I believe we’ll see continued growth with managed service partners. Devo is organizing to put more resources behind supporting those partners. That includes everything from getting their service off the ground, whether it’s a new offering or they’re migrating from another solution to Devo. We’re able to help our partners onboard new clients and add new prospects to their sales funnels. There’s great upside there for Devo.

We’re also working 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. Helping our partners develop additional skills will be critical for Devo to scale our business. It’s exciting to see the services revenue growth of partners that are investing in training and enablement around Devo. We have partners that have won contracts from existing Devo customers to provide them with ongoing services. Those partners are not just doing an implementation and walking away. They are, instead, continuing to work with enterprise customers as Devo representatives to help them realize the full value of their investment in the Devo Platform and applications.

We’re growing our partner ecosystem globally and the Devo team that works with them. We’re adding channel resources in Australia as we grow that market. We’re adding resources in EMEA to focus on the distinct business cultures of key countries. In North America we’re growing the team to handle the number of partners we currently have — while we field interest from potential new partners – so we can provide better support by increasing the frequency of contact the Devo team has with each of our partners.

Devo is growing other teams to support our partners, such as channel marketing to execute joint events to help partners build their pipeline. Our professional services team is beefing up our training capabilities so we can provide more structured enablement for partners, especially those that want to deliver services. And we’re also building a partner services team that will focus on how we support and enable our managed service partners and the general partner community.

I’d love to keep writing about our current activities and future plans, but I have to get back to work building out and enabling the fast-growing Devo partner community.