CyberFOX is Thinking Bigger
As in bigger buyers and a bigger, more diverse channel led by its first-ever channel chief.
I interview a lot of security vendors. Trust me when I tell you that even if their target market is the smallest S in SMB they never call their functionality anything less than enterprise-grade.
Unless they’re CyberFOX, a privileged access management, password management, and DNS security specialist that from the very beginning has built its strategy around offering MSPs and their SMB clients 80% of what a complex product from a name-brand vendor would give them at 90% of the price.
CyberFOX calls that undeniably contrarian formula the 80-90 rule, and it appears to be working. In the few short years since its founding early this decade, the company has grown ARR 20x and amassed over 4,000 customers, a track record strong enough to have won it a “nine-figure growth investment” led by Level Equity three months ago.
Now it’s putting some of that capital to work via a new effort aimed at expanding beyond SMBs and MSPs to a bigger class of customer and wider range of partners. On the customer side, that means mid-market enterprises big enough to handle IT without outsourced help. On the partner side, it means solution providers, distributors, and hyperscalers in addition to MSPs.
Osman Haque, who became CyberFOX’s first full-time channel chief in January, is responsible for bringing much of that vision to life. And yes, he says, it involves selling direct to end users, though not at the expense of current or future partners.
“Tie goes to the runner at any point with our MSPs,” says Haque (pictured), a former ConnectWise executive. “There’ll be no stepping on toes.”
To support what will be a more diverse channel going forward, Haque has spent much of his early months on the job constructing CyberFOX’s first formalized partner program. Like CyberFOX’s software, it’s inspired by a K.I.S.S. philosophy.
“It’s the simplest partner program possible,” Haque says. “We’re not even doing tiers.”
It won’t be huge either. “We’re not looking for hundreds of partners,” Haque says. “We’re looking for two or three really good ones for every channel that we have.”
MSPs, meanwhile, can potentially get in on some of those direct sales to larger buyers. “I am setting up the structure so that resell is available as long as they have the skillset and the ability to sell it the right way,” Haque says. “They have to add some level of value, whether it’s from a consultative perspective or tangential technologies that fit well.”
And they have to do it in a way true to the 80-90 rule, which Haque insists isn’t going anywhere despite everything else changing at CyberFOX these days.
“We’re not deviating from that core,” he says.