Stealth Networking Vendor Dispersive Launches Its First Partner Program

Dispersive Holdings, which provides ultra-secure stealth networking capabilities for government and military customers, has created its first official global partner program as the company looks to further grow its business across the broader IT marketplace.

The new program, called Dispersive Accelerate, aims to help solution providers, integrators, and cloud partners expand their services and revenue, while also growing their go-to-market and sales incentive opportunities, according to the company.

Dispersive is bringing its stealth networking technologies, which were originally developed for the U.S. military and intelligence communities by the U.S. government’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to a broad swath of enterprise customers to help them protect their operations with specialized and ultra-secure defenses.

“Dispersive is offering a novel capability, the likes of which the broader commercial market has not seen before,” Mick Miralis, the channel chief for Dispersive, told ChannelE2E. “We enable our partners to be disruptive or evolve the status quo by going beyond what their competitors are offering.”

While the official Dispersive Accelerate program is new, it is not the first time the company has worked with other companies in partner relationships, said Miralis.

“Dispersive has always been a partner-first company, although our past channel relationships have been highly customized due to the specialized needs of our intelligence community and special forces [military] clientele. As nation-states rotate full force into commercial hacking and commercial service providers experience critical systems reliability concerns, enterprises now need the same protection once reserved for governments.”

Across the industry, the IT security market has been shifting quickly from “detect and respond” to a “pre-emptive cyber and resilience” defense posture, said Miralis.

These changes “skyrocketed our product demand and, in turn, required us to get programmatic,” he said. “Our Dispersive Accelerate global partner program is fully integrated across sales, technology, and operational functions and is strategically positioned to address the next level of growth and scale.”

The new program was created in response to requests from MSPs and other partners to launch a formal channel program so they could engage more deeply with Dispersive, said Miralis.

“We were very intentional with this program and solicited extensive feedback, analyzed best practices to finalize the core tenets, and built a foundation to bring value and lasting success to the partner ecosystem,” he said. “We are confident the Dispersive Accelerate program provides a highly profitable and differentiated opportunity for our channel partners to significantly grow revenues, improve margins, and retain customers.”

One of the major benefits of the partner program is that it will democratize important NSA-level technology and make it available for use by channel partners and their customers, said Miralis. “Security is not an afterthought or dilutive to the user experience anymore. With Dispersive, security is inherent to the architecture. The need for resiliency is paramount for branch environments and the edge. Dispersive offers the best resiliency in the industry for the first, middle, and last mile.”

Dispersive’s Technology

Through its work with DARPA, Dispersive offers business customers a quantum-ready, NSA-level secure stealth networking architecture that includes multipath traffic obfuscation to make communications virtually invisible to attackers, according to the company. The technology takes a dramatically different approach compared to traditional VPNs, Zero Trust Network Access, or Secure Access Service Edge methods. Dispersive says its platform is quantum-resilient and addresses long-term cryptographic risk in government, critical infrastructure, and enterprise environments. Dispersive customers across federal, healthcare, financial, and regulated markets are using the technology to protect their operations with high-security managed services.

Dispersive offers multiple deployment options to match partner and customer requirements in cloud, hybrid, or highly secure environments.

Interesting Technology, But It Could Be a Tough Partner Pivot: Analyst

While Dispersive’s stealth networking technology is potentially interesting for the channel, Rob Enderle, principal analyst of the Enderle Group, told ChannelE2E that it can be a difficult pivot for companies to move from direct sales to the government to establishing a partner program targeting non-government accounts.

“It really will depend on the quality of the partner program, and few companies do this well the first time,” said Enderle. “Much of your product messaging will need to be redone, and you will need to spin up marketing that you likely did not need before to build demand. Then you will need to assure partners that you will not step in with your powerful sales force and displace them. This may seem like an easy pivot, but it is not, because the company dynamics and skills between the two sales channels are massively different.”

In addition, channel partners typically already have full product portfolios, so getting them to take on a new line and focus on it over offerings they know better, have been trained on, and have existing sales quotas to meet is exceedingly difficult, said Enderle.

“I do think [partners would] find this solution compelling if it will scale to a non-government enterprise, but Dispersive will need a foundation of trust that typically takes years to build, and they will be starting nearly from scratch,” said Enderle. “Their best path would have been to merge with, buy, or be acquired by a vendor under a brand that enterprises and related partners already trust, in order to move to market effectively and in a timely manner.”