 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE and horizon3.ai special presentation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Jennifer Lee, head of channel sales at horizon3.ai. Jennifer, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Great, well thank you for having me. So big news around horizon3.ai driving channel first commitment, you guys are expanding the channel partner program to include all kinds of new rewards, incentives, training programs to help educate, you know, partners to really drive more recurring revenue. Certainly cloud and cloud scale has done that. You got a great product that fits into that kind of channel model, great services you can wrap around it, good stuff. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? What are you guys doing with this news? Why is this so important? Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like you said, we recently expanded our channel partner program. The driving force behind it was really just to align our, like you said, our channel first commitment and creating awareness around the importance of our partner ecosystems. So it's really how we go to market is through the channel. And a great international focus. I've talked with the CEO about the solution and he broke down all the action on why it's important on the product side, but why now on the go to market change? What's the why behind this news on the channel? Yeah, for sure. So we are doing this now really to align our business strategy, which is built on the concept of enabling our partners to create a high value, high margin business on top of our platform. And so we offer a solution called node zero. It provides autonomous pentesting as a service and it allows organizations to continuously verify their security posture. So our company vision, we have this tagline that states that our pentesting enables organizations to see themselves through the eyes of an attacker. And we use the like the attacker's perspective to identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities. So we created this partner program from a perspective of the partner. So the partner's perspective and we've built it through the eyes of our partner, right? So we're prioritizing really what the partner is looking for and will ensure like mutual success for us. Again, partners always want to get in front of the customers and bring new stuff to them. Pentests have traditionally been really expensive. And so bringing it down and one to a service level that's one affordable and has flexibility to it allows a lot of capabilities. So I imagine people are going to get excited by it. So I have to ask you about the program. What specifically are you guys doing? Can you share any details around what it means for the partners, what they get? What's in it for them? Can you just break down some of the mechanics and mechanisms or details? Yeah, yep. So, you know, we're really looking to create business alignment and like I said, established mutual success with our partners. So we've got two key elements that we were really focused on that we bring to the partner. So the opportunity, the profit margin expansion is one of them and a way for our partners to really differentiate themselves and stay relevant in the market. So we've restructured our discount model, really highlighting profitability and maximizing profitability. And this includes our deal registration. We've created a deal registration program. We've increased discount for partners who take part in our partner certification trainings. And we have some other partner incentives that we've created that's going to help out there. We've put this all. So we've recently gone live with our partner portal. It's a consolidated experience for our partners where they can access our sales tools. And we really view our partners as an extension of our sales and technical teams. And so we've extended all of our training material that we use internally. We've made it available to our partners through our partner portal. We've, I'm thinking now back, what else is in that partner portal here? We've got our partner certification information. So all the content that's delivered during that training can be found in the portal. We've got deal registration, co-branded marketing materials, pipeline management. And so this portal gives our partners one stop place to go to find all that information. And then just really quickly on the second part of that that I mentioned is our technology really is really disruptive to the market. So, like you said, autonomous pen testing, it's still a relatively new topic for security practitioners. And it's proving to be really disruptive. So that on top of just, well, recently we found an article that mentioned by markets and markets that reports that the global pen testing markets really expanding. And so it's expected to grow to like 2.7 billion by 2027. So the market's there, right? The market's expanding, it's growing. And so for our partners, it's just really allows them to grow their revenue across their customer base, expand their customer base and offering this high profit margin. Well, you know, getting in early to market on this just disruptive technology. Big market, a lot of opportunities to make some money. People love to put more margin on those deals, especially when you can bring a great solution that everyone knows is hard to do. So I think that's going to provide a lot of value. Is there a type of partner that you guys see emerging or you aligning with, you mentioned the alignment with the partners. I can see how that the training and the incentives are all there. Sounds like it's all going well. Is there a type of partner that's resonating the most or is there categories of partners that can take advantage of this? Yeah, absolutely. So we work with all different kinds of partners. We work with our traditional resale partners. We've worked, we're working with systems integrators. We have a really strong MSP, MSSP program. We've got consulting partners and the consulting partners, especially with the ones that offer pentest services. So they use us as a force multiplier, just really offering them profit margin expansion, opportunity there. We've got some technology partner, partners that we really work with for cost sell opportunities. And then we've got our cloud partners. You'd mentioned that earlier. And so we are in AWS marketplace of our CCPO partners. We're part of the ISV Accelerate program. So we're doing a lot there with our cloud partners. And of course we go to market with distribution partners as well. Got to love the opportunity for more margin expansion. Every kind of partner wants to put more gross profit on their deals. Is there a certification involved? I have to ask, do people get certified or is it self-paced training? Is it in person? How are you guys doing the whole training certification thing, because is that a requirement? Yeah, absolutely. So we do offer a certification program and it's been very popular. This includes a seller's portion and an operator portion. And so this is at no cost to our partners. And we offer it both virtually, it's virtually but live, it's not self-paced. And we also have in-person sessions as well. And we also can customize these to any partners that have a large group of people and we can do one in-person or virtual just specifically for that partner. What any kind of incentive opportunities and marketing opportunities, everyone loves to get the deals just kind of rolling in, leads from what we can see in our early reporting. This looks like a hot product, price-wise, service level-wise. What incentives do you guys thinking about and joint marketing, you mentioned Co-Sell earlier and Pipeline, so I was kind of honing in on that piece. Sure, and yes, and then to follow along with our partner certification program, we do incentivize our partners there if they have a certain number certified, their discount increases. So that's part of it. We have our deal registration program that increases discount as well. And then we do have some partner incentives that are wrapped around meeting setting and moving opportunities along to proof of value. Got to love the education, driving value. I have to ask you, so you've been around the industry, you've seen the channel, relationships out there, you've seen companies, old school, new school, Horizon3.ai is kind of like that new school, very cloud-specific, a lot of leverage with what you mentioned, AWS and all the clouds. Why is the company so hot right now? Why did you join them? And why are people attracted to this company? What's the attraction? What's the vibe? What do you see and what did you see in this company? Well, this is just, like I said, it's very disruptive. It's really in high demand right now. And just because it's new to market and a newer technology, so we can collaborate with an annual pen tester. We can allow our customers to run their pen test with no specialty teams. And then, like I said, we can allow our partners can actually build businesses, profitable businesses, so they can use our product to increase their services, revenue and build their business model around our services. What's interesting about the pen test thing is that it's very expensive and time consuming. The people who do them are very talented people that can be working on really bigger things in the customers. So bringing this into the channel allows them, if you look at the price delta between a pen test and then what you guys are offering, I mean, that's a huge margin gap between street price of, say, today's pen test and what you guys offer. When you show people that, did they say too good to be true? I mean, what are some of the things that people say when you kind of show them that? Are they like scratch their head? Like, come on, what's the catch here? Right, so the cost savings is huge for us. And then also, like I said, working as a force multiplier with a pen testing company that offers the services and so they can do their annual manual pen test that may be required around compliance regulations. And then we can act as the continuous verification of their security, you know, that they can run weekly. And so it's just, you know, it's just an addition to what they're offering already and expansion. So Jennifer, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you coming on, sharing the insights on the channel. What's next? What can we expect from the channel group? What are you thinking? What's going on? Right, so we're really looking to expand our channel footprint and very strategically, we've got some big plans for Horizon 3.ai. Awesome. Well, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.