Grip is looking to add partners who understand the differentiated value of their offering, and the uniqueness that it will provide to customers looking for improved SaaS security.
Grip Security, which makes a SaaS security solution that unifies discovery, access control and data governance, has announced the Grip Security Partner Program.
Grip emerged from stealth in April 2021 with a SaaS security solution designed to go beyond the limits of traditional CASBs, while at the same time making it easy to cover a large number of apps, overcoming a problem that exploded with the number of apps where many apps were simply not covered.
“The company has grown by 300% and has seen a 500% growth in engagements with Fortune 500 companies,” said Lior Yaari, Grip Security’s CEO.
“The company has grown by 300% and has seen a 500% growth in engagements with Fortune 500 companies,” said Lior Yaari, Grip Security’s CEO. “There has been a lot of change and a lot market change.”
Because SaaS is closely tied to identity, Grip made it a top priority to establish deep integrations with as many identity providers as possible. That phase has now been completed.
“We have extended our integration to almost every identity provider in the market today – almost a dozen,” Yaari said. “We are now looking at bringing joint offerings with large security vendors to market. Many of these joint integrations have been signed, but have not yet been announced, as we are still building out joint value.”
Grip started out briefly selling direct in their proof of concept stage, but the pivot to the channel was in their plans, and that too has already taken place.
“We have a channel-focused Go-to-Market strategy,” Yaari stated. “14 is the number of partners that we have right now, and that is growing fast. Our third U.S. hire was our director of channel sales. This is a critical part of our strategy.”
The plan is for a fairly rapid channel expansion, not just to work with a small number of partners until they become successful.
“We aren’t looking to work with 10,000 partners, but we do want to find enough key partners,” Yaari indicated. “We are not looking for logos on the web site. We are looking for partners who want to work with us so that we can make each other successful, and where they can position themselves as a source of innovation with us.”
Insight is one of their initial partners.
“With Insight, we are not part of a special innovation program,” Yaari said. “They are an example of a partner that we have a good relationship with, who understand how to drive need and who knows that SaaS is becoming bigger.”
The problem many partners face is that since SaaS is relatively new, as they think organizations don’t have the right solutions to fix it, and they themselves lack the right backdrop for channel sales to explain it to the customer.
“For the partner, they keys are understanding the problem space, understanding the market and the patching that is used today, and understanding how we are unique and the right questions to ask to get a meeting,” Yaari said.
The program begins with a single tier, but Yaari said that they intended to expand that as the program builds out further.
Simplicity is a dominant feature of the new program.
“Our product is very different from other security products,” said Young-Sae Song, Chief Marketing Officer at Grip. “It takes 10 minutes to install. It is simple enough to be demoed by a channel sales person. You don’t need a technical person with deep training to demo it.” Grip also supports partners with jointly funded programs to promote Grip, as well as co-branded sales materials.
Song said that because Grip isn’t heavy like most SaaS solutions, the channel can go to market very quickly with it.
“It is probably faster for them than any other enterprise security product,” he stated.
It also provides support for more than 20,000 SaaS applications, allows for 80% reduction in analyst workload, and has five times more SaaS application discovery compared to CASBs.