John Tavares tells CRN he plans to double channel partners as part of a growth drive at the cloud security company.
Cloud security firm Orca Security announced Tuesday that it has appointed Dell Technologies veteran John Tavares as its new head of channel, aiming to double partners as part of a channel-focused growth push.
In an interview with CRN, Tavares said that in addition to enhancing opportunities for all partners, he will focus particularly on increasing service opportunities for the channel.
“My message is, if you haven’t talked to us, please reach out to us. We are a company that puts our partners first, and we would love to engage in additional conversations with partners who are very active in the cloud security space,” he said.
Tavares, who holds the title of Senior Vice President of Global Partner Sales and Alliances, joins Orca from cybersecurity company Zscaler, where he served as Vice President of Partners and Alliances since late 2022. Prior to that, he held a similar role at Commvault.
Earlier in his career, Tavares spent more than two decades at EMC Corp. He then spent another four years at Dell Technologies after the tech giant acquired EMC. In his last role at Dell, Tavares spent nearly three years as vice president of sales.
Orca's move to hire someone with Tavares' level of experience is a strong sign of where the company is looking with the channel, said Lauren Redzone, sales director at Sycomp, a partner of Orca Security based in Foster City, California.
“It’s really exciting to have someone like him on board,” Redzone said. “I think it signals Orca’s desire to mature its channel practices as well.”
She noted that Sycomp saw significant opportunities with Orca, especially when it came to helping customers move from simply getting better visibility into cloud security issues — to fixing those problems.
“Action has to be taken to realize that value,” she said. And that’s where Sycomp finds an increasing opportunity to help customers after identifying issues with Orca technology, according to Redzone.
Tavares said he aims to significantly increase these opportunities as he takes on his new role. For example, Orca doesn’t yet have “a formal program that empowers partners and drives them along the services front,” he said. “The first priority is to build that (the Certified Services Partner Program).”
Expanding managed services opportunities will be another area of focus, Tavares said.
He added that the Orca Channels team will also seek to achieve comprehensive improvements to the program to assist partners, including by ensuring consistency across different types of partner engagements.
“I think there is a huge opportunity for partners at Orca,” Tavares said. “We are looking to expand partner engagement throughout our entire lifecycle. We are trying to make engagement with us more than just a transaction.”
Founded in 2019, Orca has quickly become a leading vendor in the cloud security market thanks to its “SideScanning” technology. The agentless offering collects data from workloads in cloud environments and analyzes workloads for security risks without impacting performance, according to the company.
Since then, the company has expanded its platform to a full-fledged Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), the company said.
Orca recently received a $1.8 billion valuation in 2021, in connection with a $550 million Series C funding round.
