Xceedium Moves to Channel-Only Sales Model

The leadership at Xceedium is pinning its hopes on security channel providers seeking to fill in gaps within their access control portfolios with a move this week to a channel-only distribution model.

The Jersey City, N.J.-based security niche player primarily focuses on offering a client-based product that allows organizations to track, audit and control user access to resources once they’re within the network. Unlike many solutions that control access at the network level, Xceedium tightens controls on what it calls high-risk users—those who may need deep access into small portions of network resources–at a more granular level, says David Angradi, senior director of worldwide channel sales at Xceedium.

“Traditionally access solutions out there really aren’t designed to manage people once they are inside the network,” he says. “That’s why we kind of position ourselves as the next generation of access to say we’re going to give you access, but we’re also going to give you the capability of auditing every single thing that that user is dong once they are inside the network.”

Angradi says the decision to move to a 100 percent channel strategy came after evaluating the performance of its current base of partners and really understanding the value they brought to Xceedium’s sales efforts. Prior to Angradi joining the company in April 2008, the firm did not even have a formal channel program and primarily sold directly to customers. In his time with the company he’s developed a program and built up a cadre of more than 40 partners.

“What ended up happening is when you really took a good hard look at the pipeline in terms of where the deals were coming from and where the opportunities we were actually closing were coming from, it really all came from resellers,” Angradi says. “So the decision was made to really move toward a pure-play channel model and really make that full commitment to our partners.”

Part of that commitment is an improved deal registration system that he says offers partners maximum opportunity for profit.

“We’ve set up a registration program that essentially gives them a very large margin advantage over the next closest resellers,” Angradi  says. “We didn’t take a tiered approach where if you register an opportunity you only get a coupe of extra points. When you register an opportunity with us, you’re getting approximately a 20 percent advantage over the next closest competitors.”

Angradi says that the ideal reseller Xceedium seeks is the security-focused VAR that see the opportunity to satisfy the needs of heavily-regulated customers in industries such as finance, healthcare and government.
because we are a niche technology , and the partners we’ve had the best success with are really the ones that have the deepest security offerings and understand that this is an actual gap in their offering that now they can complete their offering by better managing this risk and b it gives thema  great opportunity to differentiate themselves

According to Richard Stiennon, chief research analyst for IT Harvest, Xceedium’s sales strategy shift was a ‘savvy’ move. He believes it will provides new revenue prospects for certain security solution providers.

“(It) provides the opportunity for the channel to add additional value to their customer base while creating new revenue opportunities,” Stiennon said in a statement.