The event data warehousing gurus at San Francisco-based SenSage are hoping to up their channel play with the recruitment of a new vice president of marketing a business development plucked straight from McAfee.

Just a few weeks ago Joe Gottlieb took the newly created position at SenSage after serving as vice president of corporate strategy and technology alliances for McAfee, formerly leading up the team that created McAfee’s Security Innovation Alliance. 

Gottlieb created this unique technology partnering program to amp up development of interoperable products with McAfee and to simplify the integration of these products at the customer level. A major component of the program was the Sales Teaming Program, which put resources into the hands of resellers that made it possible to not only sell McAfee products, but also third-party solutions that integrated with McAfee products.

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SenSage itself was selected as a technology partner for this invitation-only program—a circumstance that first put the company on Gottlieb’s radar. Now that he’s joined its ranks, his responsibility at SenSage is to both develop similar industry partnerships with technology vendors such as McAfee, EMC and HP and to also hone the channel program at the company.

“What you can expect from us in the not too distant future is based largely on what I learned about the channel partner programs at McAfee and at Nokia when I worked in their enterprise division before that, which is to really start to evolve our channel partner program with our different solution sets,” Gottlieb says. “That will likely lead to having not only training, but also certification and formal sales tools for each of these solutions that our channel partners can then benefit from to the extent that they are certified with our different solutions.”

Long known as a log management and security information and event management company, SenSage has lately been on a push to expand its offerings into collecting a wider range of event data from different sources. In fact, last year the company $15 million in venture funds from FTVentures and Sand Hill Capital in order to help its solution expansion into the event data warehouse space.

This big investment started bearing fruit this year with the McAfee partnership and with a similar deal to team up with EMC in order to pffer an integrated event data solution for call detail record (CDR) retention and analysis.

“Any channel partner that is already active in one of our market spaces should certainly be considering us because we really are growing quite rapidly and because of our strategy in these multiple domains we give these channel partners an opportunity to expand their business into new domains based upon our architecture,” says Gottlieb, who explains that the common product thread is the event data warehousing.

Gottlieb reports that the evolution within the channel program will be away from a catch-all program to a more tailored approach that offers resources depending on the product categories the channel partner chooses to support.

“Whereas right now we kind of have a one-size-fits-all approach and people can see the stuff that we have to offer, I see in the future having mixed channel partners, some of which may only work with us on one solution,” he says. “They’ll get the tools that they need and the training that they need to maintain a nice balance in that particular area and if they want to go further (with other products), they’ll have easy avenues to take advantage of other elements in the program in order to do so.”