PLANO, TX – August 19, 2019 – Hyper-growth MDR company adds cybersecurity industry expert Dwayne Myers as channel executive to expand nationwide distributor and channel program – Critical Start, a leading provider of Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services, today announced the appointment of Dwayne Myers as Vice President of Channels & Alliances, reporting to the company’s CEO, Rob Davis. With a focus on Critical Start’s MDR business, Myers will lead the expansion of the company’s national distributors and network of value-added resellers and other channel partners. Experiencing exponential growth, Critical Start’s MDR business grew by more than 300% last year, while maintaining a 99% customer retention rate.
Myers is an industry leader with more than two decades of security experience in channel development, sales strategy and business operations for both manufacturing and channel partners, ranging from start-up to international corporation. He was most recently responsible for growing the Palo Alto Networks partner business for their Cortex Platform across the central United States and Latin America regions. Prior to that, Myers ran the Connected Architectures Partner Development program at Cisco where he was responsible for over $1 billion in Borderless Networks business through partners in the southern United States and Latin America. Dwayne is also known for his success with the NEC America security business where he increased sales through the enterprise sales and engineering teams.
“Our success in the MDR market is driven by our unique ability to resolve every alert to stop breaches compared to competitors who compromise customers’ security by ignoring low or medium priority events to try and keep pace with the overload of alerts,” said Rob Davis, CEO at Critical Start. “As we expand nationally, Dwayne brings extensive experience building national cybersecurity partner networks that will fuel our growth and empower our partners with MDR services that offer compelling differentiation and value to their end customers.”
Critical Starts MDR services are differentiated by the industry’s only cloud-based SOAR platform that resolves 99% of security events on its own by utilizing the intelligence from billions of alerts investigated and more than 20,000 playbooks, which lets SOC analysts focus their investigations on true issues, unknowns and anomalies. Using a transparent, mobile-first engagement model, Critical Start’s MDR services support a wide range of leading enterprise security technology partners, including Carbon Black, Cylance, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk, among others.
“Managed security services are proving to be a new growth engine for resellers as they seek to combine their long-term relationships and deep knowledge of their customers’ business and infrastructure with new value-added services and recurring revenue models,” said Dwayne Myers, Vice President of Channels & Alliances at Critical Start. “As a company that started out as a cybersecurity solutions provider, Critical Start knows what channel partners need to be successful in terms of technology, business model as well as marketing and sales support so the combination of our approach and unique MDR technology is an ideal solution for partners.”
The addition of Myers as VP of Channels & Alliances adds to Critical Start’s momentum, including its recent $40 million investment from Sagemount, a distribution agreement with Ingram Micro and Westcon as well as being named to the Dallas Business Journal’s Middle Market 50 and 100 Best Places to Work lists.
