Black Duck looks to get partners in a row

Black Duck Software, which specialises in securing and managing Open Source software, has launched a global partner programme in a bid to expand the US company’s footprint across EMEA.

Former Citrix veteran Kevin Bland is charged with building “an ecosystem of strategic partners” as the firm’s new director of channels and alliances.

Bland confirms the Burlington, MA-based firm wants to ramp up its channel presence in EMEA, and increase its partner headcount from its current tally of 20 partners across the region to 100.

“Currently our EMEA business has a high dependency on channel for referral and resale,” says Bland. “Our objective is to make EMEA a channel business with our sales efforts and resources aligned to selling shoulder to shoulder.”

Black Duck claims that almost 80 percent of enterprises use open source, yet a majority acknowledge that they don’t know what open source code they have, where it is located, or if it has known security vulnerabilities.

As such, Bland claims there is “an untapped market”.

He says: “Our mission is to make automated open source code identification, targeting and security vulnerability detection part of the DNA of code development.”

The exec says the vendor is targeting security partners “who care about vulnerabilities in their customer’s applications and IT infrastructure,” adding that knowledge or practice around Open Source is a bonus.

He says that while resellers of adjacent security and management products – tools for static analysis, dynamic analysis and penetration testing for example – are good candidates for partnering with Black Duck, other organisations involved in code quality testing and actual application development are also expected to become alliance partners.

“We see partners as a way to scale services which are necessary to help customers realise the full potential of the solution

“We’ve already identified a great many ideal application security partners who, like us, are using a variety of valuable tools and providing services to assure our customers’ open source code is secure and clean,” says Bland.