Channel Champion Jeff McCullough Jumps To NetScout Spin-Off NetAlly

The former Fluke Networks and NetScout business unit has brought on Jeff McCullough, a 25-year channel veteran, to head North American sales for the 100 percent channel-focused company.

Jeff McCullough, a 25-year channel veteran, has joined NetAlly to help the networking specialist break into new markets, such as cybersecurity, and grow with the help of its global channel community.

NetAlly got its start as a business unit of Fluke Networks. It was then part of NetScout Systems and became a standalone player as of 2019. NetAlly comes to the market with its portfolio of switching, wireless, IP surveillance, storage and security products.

McCullough, the company's new vice president of sales for North America, has plans to leverage his extensive channel experience to diversify the company's products and services and accelerate growth on a global scale, the executive told CRN.

NetAlly has about 50,000 global customers across 70 countries. The company does 100 percent of its business through channel partners, which consists of about 300 solution provider partners globally, about 30 percent of which are MSP partners, the company told CRN.

While a young standalone company, NetAlly is backed by a mature, nearly 30-year-old platform and counts 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies as customers, McCullough said.

"[NetAlly] is a brand that, once you explain it to people, they know what we are and what we're about. What I'm excited about is, for sure, the legacy and history that's there and all the hard work that's gone on over the past five years as the company spun out to rebuild their channel and rearchitecting the platforms to a common core technology that allows for more flexibility and more commonality across the products," he said. "There's a lot of work that's gone on to bring us to this point and I'm joining at a really exciting time, which is focused really around investment and growth."

McCullough's first set of priorities include helping the company grow organically and investing in more resources for partners. To that end, helping to frame the portfolio as an attached portfolio for partners selling both wired and wireless offerings. At the same time, NetAlly wants to dive into the cybersecurity space via CyberScope, the company's edge network vulnerability scanner. CyberScope is a portable tool that provides a comprehensive cybersecurity risk assessment, analysis and reporting. The tool opens up a brand-new category of cybersecurity offerings to the market, McCullough said.

"[CyberScope] is essentially taking the power of our top end network tools and adding that NMAP [open source network scanning] capability on top of that, and empowering frontline workers with really robust and capable cyber scanning tools to where the customers' biggest gaps is — the edge. It's branch locations, it's remote office locations," he said. "One of our great customer use cases is stadiums and convention centers. They love products like CyberScope because they can detect new devices that enter their wireless network and seal those devices for open ports and known vulnerabilities in the software running on those devices."

McCullough said that through tools like CyberScope, NetAlly will "absolutely" be investing in growing the company's footprint in the security space. This expansion will also help partners grow their businesses with their own end customers and become even stickier, he said.

"We are really trying to lead with this new category of product," he said.

McCullough will be working closely with NetAlly's chief revenue officer David Kraig on the strategy and direction of the company's channel — its only route to market, he said.

“Everyone here is partner-facing, so we kind of all speak the same language. We all have the same attitude in terms of: ‘How do we put partners first? How do we lead with partners? How do we build our business around what partners are capable of?’” McCullough said.

McCullough comes to NetAlly from SolarWinds, where he most recently served as global vice president of cloud and partner sales. Prior to that, McCullough served as global vice president, partner and alliance sales for Park Place Technologies and was vice president, Americas partner sales and strategic alliances for NetApp.