 Everyone, welcome back to our special presentation with theCUBE and horizon3.ai. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto with the CEO and co-founder of Horizon 3, Neil Antony, who's here with me to talk about the big news. We've been talking about your global expansion. Congratulations on the growth and international and just overall success of what looks like to be a very high margin, relevant business in the security space. Yeah, thank you, John. I'm very excited to be here and especially this focus on partners because partners in cybersecurity have such an important role and we've built a company that enables partners to grow with us. We had a chance to talk to some of your staff and some of the people in the industry around the channel. I mean, the old school technology vendors would go in, build channels, redistribute resellers, VARs, value-added resellers, value-added businesses, all kinds of different ways to serve customers indirectly and then you get the direct sales force. You guys seem to have a perfect product for a hard, profitable market where channels are starved for solutions in the security space. What did you guys find as you guys launched this? What was some of the feedback? What was some of the reasoning behind? Obviously indirect sales helps your margins. You enable some pieces of self for you, but what was the epiphany? So when you think about the telecommunications industry back in the 2000s, we always talked about the last mile in telco, right? It was easy to get fiber run to the neighborhood, but the last mile from the neighborhood to the house was very difficult. So what we found during COVID was this was especially true in cybersecurity because in COVID you've got individuals that need security capabilities, whether they are IT directors, barely treading water or CISOs and so on. And they needed these trusted relationships to decide what security technologies to use, how to improve their posture. And they're not gonna go to just some website to learn. They've got years of relationships built with those regional partners, those regional resellers, MSSPs, MSPs, IT consulting shops. So what we did over the past two years was embrace this idea that regional partners are the last mile of cybersecurity. So how do we build a product and a business model that enables those last mile channel partners to make even more revenue using us to underpin their offerings and services and get them to take advantage of the trust that they've built over many hard years and use that trust to not only improve the posture of their customers, but have Horizon 3 become a force enabler along the way. Yeah, it's interesting. You have that pre-built channel makeup but also new opportunities for people to bring security because you guys have the node zero capability. Because pen testing is only one of the things you guys are starting to do now and everyone knows we've talked about this in our previous interviews, it's hard. People have all kinds of app sec review, application reviews all the time and if you're doing cloud native, you're constantly pushing new codes. So the need for a pen test is kind of a continuous thing. Okay, so I get that. The other thing that I found out on the interviews was and I want to get your reaction to this is that there's an existing channel of pen testers that are high IQ, high paid services. So it almost feels like you guys have created kind of like a way to automate some of the basic stuff but still enable the existing folks out there doing this work. I won't say it was below their pay grade but a lot of it was kind of remedial things. Explain and react to that because I think that's a key nuance point to this expansion. Yeah, so the key thing is how do you run a security test at scale? So if you are a human pen tester, maybe in a couple of weeks you could pen test 5,000 hosts. If you're really good maybe 10,000 hosts but when you've got a large manufacturer or a bank that's got hundreds of thousands or millions of hosts there's no way a human's gonna be able to do that. So for the really large shops what we found is this idea of human machine teaming where you run us to run infrastructure testing at scale we'll conduct reconnaissance, we'll do exploitation at scale, we'll find all the juicy interesting stuff and then that frees up the time for the human to focus on the stuff humans are gifted at. This is a joke that let us focus on all the things that will test at scale so the human can focus on the problems that get them to speak at DEF CON and let them focus on the really hard interesting juicy stuff while we are executing tests and at a large scale that's important but also think about Europe. In Germany there are less than 600 certified pen testers for the entire country. In Norway I think there's less than 85. In Estonia there's less than 20. There's just not enough supply of certified testers to be able to effectively meet the demand. It's interesting when you ever have these when you ever see these inflection points in industries there's always a 10x multiple or some multiple inflection point that kicks up the growth. Google pioneered site reliability engineers. You see it now in cloud native with containers and Kubernetes. Writing scripts is now going to be more about architecture operating large scale systems. So instead of being a pen tester they're now a pen architect. Yeah. Well in many ways it's a security by design philosophy which is I would rather verify my architecture upfront verify my security posture upfront and not wait for the bad guys to show up to poke holes in my environment. And then even economically the way we design the product most of our users are not pen testers. They're actually IT admins, network engineers, people with the CISSP type certification and we give them superpowers. And there are in back to 10x for every one certified ethical hacker there are 10 to 20 certified CISPs. So even the entire experience was designed around those types of security practitioners and network engineers versus the very exquisite pen test types. Yeah. It's a great market opportunity. I think this is going to be a big kind of a an example of how scale works. So congratulations. A couple of questions I had for you for this announcement was what are some of the obstacles that you see organizations facing that the channel partners can participate in? Cause again, more feet on the street I get the expansion but what problems are they solving? Yeah. When you think about back when I was a CIO there was a very well-defined journey I went through. Assess my security posture. I have to assess it at least once or twice a year. I want to assess it as often as possible. From there as I find problems the hardest part of my job was deciding what not to fix. And I didn't have enough people to remediate all the issues. So the natural next step is how do I get surge expertise to remediate all of the findings from those assessments? From there, the next thing is, okay while I'm fixing those problems did my security team or outsourced MSSP detect and respond to those attacks? And if so great, if not what are the blind spots in my detection response? And then the final step is being that trusted advisor to the executive team the board and regulators around that virtual CISO or strategic security advice. So that is the spectrum of requirements that any customer has. Assess, remediate, verify your detections and then strategic advice and guidance. Every channel partner has some aspect of those businesses within their portfolio and we enable revenue to be generated for our partners across every one of those. Use us to do assessments at scale. Automatically generate the statement of work for everything that we found and then our partners make money fixing the issues that we've identified. Use us to audit the blind spots of your security stack and then finally use our results over time to provide strategic advice to the CISO, the board and the regulators. Yeah, it's a great, great gap you fill for sure. And with the up the scale you give other pen testers, a lot of growth there. The question that comes up though I have to ask you and this is what's on people's minds probably because that would be the first thing I would ask. Well, you guys are kind of new and I get this thing. So what will make you an ideal partner? Why Horizon 3.ai as the partner? What do you bring to the table? Yeah, I think there's a few things. One is we're approaching our three year anniversary. We've scaled very quickly. We've built a great team. But what differentiates us is our authenticity at scale, our transparency of how we work as a partner and the fact that we've built a company that very specifically enables partners to make high quality money. In my previous companies I've worked at, partners were kind of relegated to doing low level professional services type work. And if I'm a services shop, that's not gonna be very valuable for me. That's a one and done come in, install a product, tune it and so on. What I want if I'm a partner is working with technology companies that care deeply about my growth as a partner and then is creating an offering that allows me to white label it to build my own high margin business above it, give me predictable cost of goods sold so I can build in staff a high functioning organization. That's what we did at Horizon 3 is we built the entire company around enabling MSSPs, MSPs, consulting shops. From day one. From day one, that was the goal. And so the entire company's been designed. You can white label the product. The entire experience can look like yours if you want it to be. The entire company was built from day one to be channel friendly. This is again a key point. Again, I want to double click on that because at the end of the day, money making is pretty big important thing. Partners, channel partners and resellers and partners don't want to lose their customer. Want to add value and make high margins. So is it easy to use? How do I consume it? How do I deploy it? Do you feel comfortable that you guys can deliver on that? Yeah, and in fact, a big cultural aspect of Horizon 3 is we let our results do the talking. So I don't need to convince people through PowerPoint. What partners will do is they'll show up. They will run us for themselves. They'll run us against some trusted customers of theirs. They get blown away by the results. They get a Horizon 3 tattoo at the end. And then they become our biggest champions and advocates. And ultimately, when you have that land and you can show results and it's a white label, it's an instant money maker for the partner. That's great, Neil. Thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it. That's a wrap here on the big news and the big news announcement around Horizon 3.ai, global expansion, new opportunities, new channel partners, great product, good for the channel, makes money, helps customers. Can't beat that. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.