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Risk I/O, the platform that lets companies monitor and prioritize critical vulnerabilities, is getting access to nearly 5,000 new customers today, thanks to a single intuitive partnership with Dell SecureWorks.
The partnership will “massively expand Risk I/O’s sales generation to folks who are right in our sweet spot immediately,” Risk I/O CEO Ed Bellis said. This is the first time Risk I/O has partnered with a managed service provider in its three-year history - but Bellis said it won’t be the last.
Even though Risk I/O still does a majority of its business directly with the 800 companies using it, that will quickly change: given the ease of replicating integrations like these, Risk I/O will likely announce two or three more MSP partnerships soon.
“It’s something we think we can replicate to scale our business; we are looking at other MSPs for integration over the next 18 to 24 months,” Bellis said. “The good news is we enabled our platform to replicate this deal pretty easily in terms of the integration work.”
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While Risk I/O’s customer base will exponentially increase from these future integrations, MSPs will benefit too, of course. In this first partnership, for example, Dell SecureWorks customers will be able to access Risk I/O’s asset and vulnerability data through a single sign-in, making Dell SecureWorks “a better service provider” overall, Dell SecureWorks Director of Product Management Mark Wood said in a statement.
The promise of more MSP partnerships (and therefore of more customers) is causing Bellis and his team to double the 15-person team by the end of the year: “We are already hiring out in front of us from all the indications we’ve gotten from our customers,” Bellis said. The sales, marketing and engineering hires will be split between the Chicago headquarters and the San Francisco office.
Risk I/O’s Chicago office will continue to house R&D and engineering staff because “it’s a great place in terms of the substantial size of the tech community, but you don’t have the issues you have in the Bay Area in terms of employee retention,” Bellis said.
But local dev talent isn’t the only reason Risk I/O calls Chicago home: the company sticks around because of local investors (Hyde Park Ventures), an extensive local network (Bellis was formerly at Orbitz) and a variety of local customers spanning verticals and sizes.
A diverse business ecosystem like Chicago’s right in Risk I/O’s backyard has been a huge advantage in giving the company a taste of the many different kinds of companies that use Risk I/O, Bellis said; all types of companies need the 24/7 vulnerability intelligence that Risk I/O provides, not just companies in government or financial sectors. (Just look at the recent Heartbleed breach for proof.)
“Our customers range in verticals and in size from the Fortune 10 to companies with 50 employees because they are working with the same burden and trying to prioritize their workload,” Bellis said. “There’s always something going on and it’s really come to the point where it’s affecting everybody.”
