Dataminr Hires Cloudflare Alum Matt Harrell As Channel Chief, Aims For Services Expansion

Harrell tells CRN that managed security services and advisory services—leveraging Dataminr’s AI platform—represent massive opportunities for partners.

AI platform provider Dataminr announced Tuesday it has hired former Cloudflare channel chief Matt Harrell as its new chief partner officer, with the company looking to intensify its push with partners around security services.

Speaking with CRN, Harrell said the timing is ideal for Dataminr to look at scaling up in a bigger way with channel partners, and he expects to engage in recruiting more MSSPs and VARs going forward.

Managed security services and advisory services leveraging Dataminr’s AI platform represent massive opportunities for partners, he said.

“We've got AI technology that has speed—AI applied against millions of data sources allows us to provide really compelling threat intel,” Harrell said.

The hire comes after Dataminr named industry veteran Brian Gumbel as its new president in April as the company approaches $200 million in revenue and eyes an initial public offering in coming years.

Formerly the global head of channels and alliances at Cloudflare since 2019, Harrell served as head of Americas channels at Google earlier in his career.

In terms of managed security services, one opportunity for MSSPs is on developing services around third-party risk alerting using Dataminr, according to Harrell.

For instance, MSSPs might offer a “third-party risk alerting service that allows us to monitor not just the managed service providers' end customer but also the suppliers that that customer works with,” he said.

At one partner of Dataminr, SHI-owned Stratascale, the opportunities to use the vendor’s AI technology for cyber defense have been expanding quickly amid growing threats.

Dataminr’s technology is “incredibly unique,” said David Olzak, senior vice president at Stratascale.

“We leverage that for both proactive and reactive services,” Olzak said, including third-party risk management as well as governance, risk and compliance services.

Ultimately, when it comes to AI-powered threat intel, Dataminr is “the only one that I know of where they have the ability to really bring true relevance” to MSSPs and customers, he said.

Harrell said that Dataminr will increasingly be looking to partners for playing a key role in fine-tuning the company’s alerting engine on behalf of customers, along with in areas such as securing application development services.

All in all, “it’s very early days, but [for partners] this is a really compelling value proposition and technology that can be leveraged in a lot of ways,” he said.