MARKETING STRATEGY
GlobeNewswire | May 25, 2023
High Wire Networks, Inc. (OTCQB: HWNI), a leading global provider of managed cybersecurity and technology enablement, announced its vice president of marketing and communications, Susanna Song, was named to the 2023 Women of the Channel by CRN®, a brand of The Channel Company.
CRN annually recognizes women whose expertise and vision are leaving a noticeable and commendable mark on the technology industry. The 2023 Women of the Channel list will be featured in the June issue of CRN Magazine, with online coverage at www.CRN.com/WOTC.
The professionals earning this accolade represent the growing percentage of women emerging as leaders in the technology sphere. According to the Women Tech Network, women now make up about 28% of the tech workforce, compared to just 9% in the early 2000s.
The CRN 2023 Women of the Channel honorees are recognized for their creativity, strategic thinking and leadership in a variety of roles and responsibilities, and for applying their talents toward supporting the success of their companies, channel partners and customers.
“We are ecstatic to announce this year’s honorees and shine a light on these women for their significant achievements, knowing that what they’ve accomplished has paved the way for continued success within the IT channel,” said Blaine Raddon, CEO of The Channel Company. “The channel is stronger because of them, and we look forward to seeing what they do next.”
Song leads the marketing of High Wire’s managed cybersecurity and IT enablement services that is driven 100% by its channel partners which now total more than 625 worldwide, including many of the Fortune 500.
“Under the leadership of Susanna, our marketing team has played an instrumental role in driving our company's growth and success,” said Stephen LaMarche, COO of High Wire Networks. “Through their exceptional efforts, we have expanded our channel partner network and achieved strong revenue growth. The recognition and trust we have built among our channel partners have also translated into an expanding pipeline of business opportunities.”
Song is also the founder, producer and co-host of The Cybersecurity Simplified Podcast, which last year logged more than 100,000 downloads, drew listeners from more than 100 countries, and ranked in the top 5% of most podcasts shared globally on Spotify.
Song commented: “I am honored to be among the many amazing women who make up the Women of the Channel list for this year. I’m grateful to my colleagues and the leadership at High Wire who support my endeavors and inspire me to be innovative. It is a collaborative effort day in and day out to go beyond the status quo and grow our partner community, maintain the trust of our channel partners, and continuously enable their success.”
In February, High Wire was named by CRN Magazine to its MSP 500 and Elite 150 lists for 2023. This was the third CRN award High Wire received over the past few years while Song served as VP of marketing and communications. Song was also featured on CRN’s 2021 Channel of the Women list.
To learn more about High Wire and its award-winning managed cybersecurity and IT enablement services, visit HighWireNetworks.com or view the company’s free video series on YouTube.
About CRN
CRN, a media brand of The Channel Company, is the No. 1 trusted source for IT channel news, analysis and insight online and in print. The CRN editorial staff provides objective reporting on daily technology and channel news, events and trends, empowering solution providers such as systems integrators, value-added resellers, managed service providers (MSPs), strategic service providers and IT consultants to maintain a competitive advantage and deliver the business outcomes their customers need. Its coverage can be found at CRN.com and in CRN magazine, which prints six times per year plus special issues.
Since 1982, CRN's talented team of editors has reported on the news solution providers need to build successful businesses. CRN is the go-to source for breaking news on the IT channel, including technology vendors’ channel programs, channel management executives and product and services portfolios; distributors and cloud distributors; MSP platform vendors and solution providers themselves. Coverage crosses over a variety of technology areas, including cloud, security, data center, networking, software, storage, managed services, computing and components and peripherals.
About High Wire Networks
High Wire Networks, Inc. (OTCQB: HWNI) is a fast-growing, award-winning global provider of managed cybersecurity and IT enablement services. Through more than 625 channel partners, it delivers trusted managed services for nearly 1,000 managed security customers and tens of thousands of technology customers. Its end-customers include hundreds of Fortune 500 companies and the nation’s largest government agencies.
High Wire has 125 full-time employees worldwide and four U.S. offices, including a U.S. based 24/7 Network Operations Center and Security Operations Center in Chicago, with additional regional offices in Puerto Rico and United Kingdom.
High Wire was recently ranked by Frost & Sullivan as a Top 12 Managed Security Service Provider in the Americas. It was also recently named to CRN’s MSP 500 and Elite 150 lists of the nation’s top IT managed service providers.
Learn more at HighWireNetworks.com. Follow the company on Twitter, view its extensive video series on YouTube or connect on LinkedIn.
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CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS
Business Wire | April 17, 2023
Concentric AI, a leading vendor of intelligent AI-based solutions for autonomous data security posture management (DSPM), today launched its new channel partner program. The program is aimed at enabling partners’ growth and success delivering the leading solution in the rapidly expanding AI-powered data risk management market to improve customers’ security posture.
With Concentric AI’s partner ecosystem in place, end users are better-positioned to realize the full value of its Semantic Intelligence™ AI-powered data risk management platform. To support and accelerate partners’ capabilities, Concentric AI is committed to building up their expertise, differentiating their skills, and maximizing their unique contributions, while equipping them to sell the leading DSPM platform. The program aims to help partners generate new recurring revenue opportunities and increase profitability and margins with new partner value-added services, enabling them to differentiate themselves from competitors.
“Our partners play a crucial role broadening the reach of our leading AI-powered data risk management solution to best meet their clients’ cloud and on-prem data protection needs,” said Karthik Krishan, Concentric AI CEO. “Our channel partner program is designed to create massive opportunities for our partners to grow with us well beyond where we can go alone. We are passionate about our partners’ success, and are committed to enabling them with the best solutions and flexibility to bring tremendous value for their customers.”
Highlights and benefits of Concentric AI’s channel-first strategy include:
Ease of POC
Recurring revenue/SaaS product
Registration protection
Technical training, documentation, and support for Sales
Proven track record against competing products
Cybersecurity consultants and experts Set Solutions, Inc., delivers advanced cybersecurity consulting and procurement solutions tailored to commercial, enterprise, government and educational customers. Its consultative approach aligns the best security solutions with individual customer’s requirements, creating long-term partnerships focused on building resilient, integrated cybersecurity programs. Already a trusted partner, Set Solutions is an early member of the Concentric AI channel partner program.
“Over the years Set Solutions has developed extremely close relationships with enterprise organizations and we’ve repeatedly heard about issues with legacy solutions for data classification and data security posture management,” said Dan Broussard, Executive Vice President of Sales, Set Solutions, Inc. “We’d been looking for a partner that has an easy-to-deploy solution that actually works and isn’t a headache to manage. We found that in Concentric AI, as well as a team that has been easy to work with and has met the unique needs of our enterprise customers.”
Growth and Industry Recognition
In 2022 Concentric AI monitored up to 1.5 petabytes of data per customer and secured one million users. The Semantic Intelligence platform protected 24 million unstructured data files/records from being overshared, and classified 400 million data files/records for its customers.
Last year, Gartner recognized Concentric AI in four Hype Cycles – Data Security, Security Operations, Storage and Data Protection, and Data Management. Within Gartner’s “Hype Cycle for Data Security, 2022,” Concentric AI was specifically recognized as a vendor in the emerging Data Security Posture Management space, in addition to the Data Access Governance and Data Discovery and Management categories. Gartner’s Hype Cycles recognize emerging technologies and help customers understand how the value of a technology evolves over its maturity lifecycle.
Concentric AI was also a 2022 Baby Black Unicorn Award finalist, awarded to companies which could be worth $1 Billion in market value in 3 – 5 years. As a finalist for the SINET innovation award in 2022, Concentric AI stood out among the hundreds of emerging cybersecurity technologies selected by SINET as the most innovative and compelling companies. Finally, Solutions Review named Concentric AI one of the best data security platforms in 2022.
Concentric AI continues to provide extraordinary customer value across industries. For example, in the financial services industry, where protecting sensitive data is paramount, Concentric AI worked with one of the largest U.S. credit unions to deploy its data classification and data security posture management program.
“We had tried to roll out our data security posture management program multiple different times using different products,” said the credit union’s Principal IT Security Architect. “They all failed based on the fact that they were all using regular expressions as a way of detecting the different categories of data we have. It didn’t work. Concentric AI hit every single data category that we needed to identify using AI, and that’s the real benefit of the product. By using machine learning to go in and figure out sensitivity based on the context and content of the of the data, and then to monitor and protect that data – that was absolutely spot-on and is working very well for us.”
Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence™ automates unstructured and structured data security using deep learning to categorize data, uncover business criticality and reduce risk. Its Risk Distance™ analysis technology uses the baseline security practices observed for each data category to spot security anomalies in individual files. It compares documents of the same type to identify risk from oversharing, third-party access, wrong location, or misclassification. Organizations benefit from the expertise of content owners without intrusive classification mandates, with no rules, regex, or policy maintenance needed.
Channel partners’ customers benefit from the product’s key differentiators, including:
No rules, policies, or up-front work
Minimal false positives and negatives
10 minutes to deploy, with no agents
Lowest data security TCO
Fastest time to value
About Concentric AI
With Concentric AI, organizations can finally address their unmet data security needs by discovering and protecting business-critical content. Concentric AI protects intellectual property, financial data, PII/PCI content, customer data, business confidential content and more, across on-premises and cloud-based data stores, as well as messaging and communication applications. The Concentric AI Semantic Intelligence™ Data Security Posture Management solution uses deep learning and Risk Distance™ analysis to accurately categorize data, assess risk, and remediate security issues – without relying on upfront rules or complex configuration. Concentric AI is venture-backed by leading Silicon Valley VCs and is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. For more information, see https://www.concentric.ai.
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CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS
Accesswire | May 15, 2023
Today, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²), a technology incubator funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation and co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), announced its seventh cycle of Channel Partner Strategic Awards. This year, IN² distributed $970,000 among seven winners to fund innovative and impactful projects that are intended to strengthen and diversify the cleantech and agtech ecosystems.
Winners received funding between $100,000 to $250,000. Applications were reviewed based on their potential for capacity building, with a particular focus on fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion, or supporting pilot and demonstration projects for startups. Selections were guided by a commitment to distribute funds equally across the U.S.
"The IN² Channel Partner Network fosters meaningful connections and provides critical support to a diverse group of industry stakeholders," said Trish Cozart, IN² Program Manager at NREL. "Leveraging NREL's ability to bring people and resources together, the Channel Partner Awards aim to drive impact throughout the cleantech and agtech ecosystems to advance a sustainable future for all."
The 2023 Channel Partner Strategic Award winners are:
AgLaunch (Memphis, TN) will form a Cleantech Pilot & Demonstration Network for Underserved Communities to increase the participation of small and minority farmers in pilots and demonstration projects, who will receive equity in the company they support. They will also develop a similar approach for clean energy innovations in underserved markets in collaboration with the HBCU Clean Energy Initiative.
BRITE Energy Innovators (Warren, OH) and the Centrepolis Accelerator (Southfield, MI) will launch a joint program aimed at supporting underrepresented climate tech entrepreneurs in Ohio and Michigan by combining their core programs, increasing access, and helping underserved founders reach commercialization faster.
Evergreen Climate Innovations (Chicago, IL) will use the award to expand support for underrepresented founders in the climate tech space, focusing on solutions deployable in historically underserved communities, and offering assistance for pursuing pilot and demonstration opportunities in line with the White House's Justice40 Initiative.
Grid Catalyst (Minneapolis, MN) will use the funding to lead a demonstration cohort for energy and hardtech startups, matching them with Minnesota-based partners for pilot projects, and accelerating the process of initiating these projects within six months of the application process.
Launch Alaska (Anchorage, AK) will use the award to support and expand its Tech Deployment Track program, which aids climate tech startups and historically underserved legacy energy communities in Alaska in acquiring demonstration partners and funding, as well as increasing partner diversity and providing travel stipends for rural-based mentors.
Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) (Los Angeles, CA) will use the award to enhance its Impact Framework and Equity Earn Back program, which allows its portfolio companies (65% of which are owned by Black, Indigenous, and people of color) to earn back up to 50% of LACI's equity stake by improving environmental, social, and economic impacts.
Urban Future Lab (Brooklyn, NY) will use award funding to host events connecting climate tech startups, investors, and community-based organizations to accelerate pilot project deployments while promoting an equitable transition in the climate economy.
"The transition to a resilient, equitable, and sustainable future requires innovation in climate clean tech," said Robyn Luhning, chief sustainability officer at Wells Fargo. "The Wells Fargo Foundation is proud to support the diverse group of entrepreneurs who are innovating in this space with this year's Channel Partner Awards."
In addition to the Strategic Awards, IN² awarded $19,000 in Connector Awards in January 2023 and is planning to allocate another $16,000 this summer. Connector Awards support Channel Partner events and activities.
IN² launched the Channel Partner Strategic Awards program in 2017 to nurture the Channel Partner ecosystem, which includes more than 60 cleantech and agtech business incubators, accelerators, universities, and industry experts. Since its inception, the IN² Channel Partner Strategic Awards program has distributed more than $6 million, supporting 55 Strategic Awards and 174 Ecosystem or Connector Awards. The nationwide program engages thousands of entrepreneurs, students, investors, mentors, and industry experts. Startups supported by the program have raised $208 million, in addition to $5 million in matched program funding.
In 2021, IN² distributed $350,000 in Channel Partner Strategic Awards specifically to provide entrepreneurial opportunities for historically underrepresented groups in the cleantech industry. The funds delivered through IN2 supported six HBCUs as well as thousands of BIPOC people and organizations including 134 students, 70 farmers, 11 startups, six community partners, and 1,820 businesses.
During the COVID pandemic in 2020, the program provided $900,000 in relief awards. The awards supported 371 startups, generating over $19 million in revenue, 106 new jobs, 1,500 new customers, and $78 million in investments and other funding.
About the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²)
The Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²) is a $50 million clean technology program funded by the Wells Fargo Foundation and co-administered by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). IN² identifies and supports promising cleantech startups, with the goal of commercializing low-carbon solutions in order to achieve the associated social, economic, and climate benefits that are so urgently required. The program aligns creative entrepreneurial solutions with robust resources in order to reduce emissions across the economy, with a focus on minimizing the energy impact of commercial buildings, affordable residential housing, and agriculture sectors. More specifically, IN² helps early- and mid-stage clean technology startups overcome common market barriers by delivering up to $250,000 in non-dilutive funding in the form of research and development support from world-class scientists. Participants also gain access to lab facilities at NREL and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, and connections to a robust, cross-industry network of foundations, investors and other stakeholders. For more information, visit www.IN²ecosystem.com.
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