Horizon3.ai is bulking up its partner program for MSSPs and other channel players to accelerate their businesses and expand the reach of the vendor’s NodeZero platform, which automates pentesting and continuous exposure management services.
At the company’s inaugural Global Partner Conference this week in Frisco, Texas, Horizon3.ai executives unveiled its global Vanguard Partner Program, which includes a tiered structure with three levels offering escalating benefits, as well as greater go-to-market (GTM) support through deal registration, lead sharing, renewal protection, and other advantages.
The Vanguard program is designed to benefit both partners and their clients, according to Marc Inderhees, vice president of channels and alliances at the San Francisco-based company.
“MSSPs are key to Horizon3’s GTM strategy,” Inderhees told MSSP Alert. “Our multi-tenancy capabilities in NodeZero empower our partners to effectively deliver autonomous security services in a managed services model.”
In addition, he said that “many Horizon3 customers prefer to work with Horizon3 MSSPs and experience the benefits of our NodeZero capabilities in an as-a-service model.”
Adding to the Platform
Horizon3.ai has been aggressively expanding the capabilities in NodeZero, which is designed to allow companies and their service providers to act more offensively when it comes to pentesting, which is used to test the security of a company’s infrastructure and eliminate weaknesses that can be exploited.
NodeZero is an automated software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that aims to let organizations think and act like attackers using real-world tactics. The platform includes internal and external pentesting, phishing impact testing, Active Directory password auditing, and insights gathered by NodeZero.
Over the past year, Horizon3.ai added a number of other services, including pentesting for Kubernetes environments, the cloud, and compliance. In addition, last year, the company unveiled phishing impact testing, NodeZero Insights capability, and Tripwires, which offers pentesting with integrated threat detection.
The Numbers are Growing
The security and pentesting platform is used by more than 3,000 organizations in almost 120,000 real-world tests, according to the company. Horizon3.ai executives in February said that its partner-first strategy helped it see 101% year-over-year revenue growth last year, 106% growth in the partner-sourced pipeline, and more than 150% of its fourth-quarter pipeline targets.
In addition, 80% of those 3,000-plus customers partner with MSSPs.
The NodeZero platform can “scale autonomously to support the largest of organizations,” Inderhees said, adding that NodeZero's reports highlight weaknesses and exploits that were discovered. “The prioritized reports enable MSSPs and MSPs to focus their ‘find/fix/verify’ efforts on findings that are truly exploitable.”
Pentesting is becoming an increasingly important capability at a time when the number and sophistication of cyberattacks continue to grow, which means organizations are scrambling for ways to defend against such trends. The global market is predicted to grow from $1.7 billion last year to $3.9 billion by 2029
In addition, an offering like NodeZero fits in with the trend in security toward tightly integrated platforms, saving organizations from having to buy, integrate, and manage myriad point products. Companies, which often lack the needed in-house talent, also are turning to MSSPs and MSPs to run such platforms.
Pentesting and MSSPs
The six-year-old company’s Vanguard program comes the same week that Bugcrowd rolled out a new service for MSPs and MSSPs to expand their pentesting capabilities.
The Horizon3.ai Vanguard program’s features include Silver, Gold, and Platinum levels for partners – including consultants and distributors – is aimed at enabling them to scale their offerings and expand recurring revenue opportunities. Along with the tiers and GTM help, the Vanguard program also includes multi-tenant licensing and proof-of-value (POV) capabilities, training on demand and with instructors, and role-based accreditations for sales executives, solution architects, and administrators.
Horizon3.ai also provides co-branded content and access to a partner portal to enable the platform to be integrated into other services offerings.
