VMRay Launches Global Channel Program

VMRay has launched a global channel program that seeks to expand adoption of an agentless approach to detecting and analyzing malware.

In addition, the company has appointed Zac Kenney to be its channel chief. Previously, Kenney held channel positions at Zix, JRebel and Carbonite.

VMRay thus far has had a fledgling channel effort made up of about a dozen partners. The company gained an additional round of $10 million in funding last Fall that is now being used in part to create a formal channel program.

At the core of the VMRay product line is a sandbox approach to detecting malware that doesn’t make use of agent software to monitor a hypervisor. As such, malware can’t detect the presence of the sandbox, which is a technique that cybercriminals often rely on to evade malware detection tools.

The VMRay product portfolio consists of the core VMRay Detector and VMRay Analyzer offerings along with VMRay Email Threat Defender, which automates the scanning, extraction and analysis of inbound emails for known and suspected threats that have managed to bypass traditional email gateways. Those offerings can be deployed on-premises or in a public cloud.
Depending on the size of the deal, Kenney say channel partners can expect to see profit margins ranging from $20,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“We’re looking for partners that have a fair amount of technical expertise in cybersecurity,” says Kenney.

The launch of the VMRay channel program comes at a time when there has been a marked shift in cybersecurity spending toward threat hunting. The assumption many IT organizations now make its that new types of malware have been able to evade their firewall and endpoint security defenses. The primary task has become to detect malware before it becomes activated.

As is always the case with cybersecurity, the number of channel partners with the expertise required to build a practice around threat hunting is limited. However, for those partners that have relationships with organizations that already have threat hunting expertise the opportunity to resell malware analysis and detection software remains quite substantial.