Congruity360 Hires New CRO, Plans Channel Program For Data Governance

‘We don’t have an official channel program yet. But on August 1, we just hired a new director of our global channel organization, Morgan Hartley, from Symantec’s cloud business. By year-end, we’ll have a full-fledged channel program utilizing my and her experiences. We’ll be a CRN 5-Star Partner Program company,’ says Dave Casillo, Congruity360 chief revenue officer.

Congruity360, a former cloud-focused solution provider that transitioned to a vendor of SaaS data governance software, this week introduced Dave Casillo as its new chief revenue officer with a mandate to oversee the building of the company’s first channel program.

Casillo, a veteran of direct and indirect sales at several SaaS companies and channel companies, said he is bringing his channel experience to build a world-class channel program to help partners build their data governance businesses.

“We don’t have an official channel program yet,” Casillo told CRN. “But on August 1, we just hired a new director of our global channel organization, Morgan Hartley, from Symantec’s cloud business. By year-end, we’ll have a full-fledged channel program utilizing my and her experiences. We’ll be a CRN 5-Star Partner Program company.”

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Hartley is also working with partner enablement leaders to help data consultants, IT services companies, global systems integrators, and other types of partners with on-boarding, engagement, and support, he said.

Congruity360 hopes to have a comprehensive partner portal offing deal registration and other platforms by year-end, Casillo said.

Norwell, Mass.-based Congruity360 was born in 2017 with the merger of two solution providers: Congruity, a solution provider and MSP with a storage focus, and KNJ, a provider of electronic discovery consulting and services. The company at the time also had a third-party hardware maintenance business, but over time shed that part of its business, most recently with the sale last week of its remaining third-party hardware maintenance assets to Park Place Technologies, Casillo said.

It was that SaaS governance focus that attracted Casillo to work with Congruity360.

“The unstructured data world is booming,” he said. “Maybe 80 percent to 90 percent of all data being created today is unstructured. A lot of companies are focused on structured data management. But Congruity360 saw the growth opportunity in unstructured data.”

The primary focus of Congruity360’s Classify360 platform for data classification and governance, said Mari DiBenedetto, the company’s vice president of product management and marketing.

“We’re strong on unstructured data, but we’re also working on structured data, and will roll out our offering by the end of the year,” DiBenedetto told CRN. “We’re also building out our out-of-the-box capabilities so users get a strong and easy solution. We’re also looking to integrate some of our adjacent software solutions, including our legal hold software, to provide a seamless solution.”

What Congruity360 has done in focusing on SaaS governance is refreshing for channel partners working with clients in the legal market, said Reggie Pool, senior director at HBR Consulting, a Chicago-based boutique consulting company focused on information governance, privacy, and e-discovery for companies in the Am Law 200 list of top law firms as well as the legal departments of large organizations.

“We look at what content an organization has, how they control it, classify it, index it, organize it, how long they keep it, and how to ensure privacy,” Pool told CRN. “The technologies in Congruity360’s Classify360 helps us set up monitoring, control, and more in the cloud.”

HBR Consulting has a lot of interest in helping clients understand the cloud and what they need to do before migrating their data, Pool said.

“Classify360 has a unique ability to identify and index content, and uses machine learning to allow us to help clients index and classify their information according to policies,” he said. “We can use it to prepare retention policies related to content disposal and migration, and prepare tags that resonate wherever the content lives.”

Pool said there are other vendors doing pieces and parts of the solution, so Congruity360 is not totally unique.

“A lot of tools can look at a document and find social security numbers or identification data,” he said. “But Classify360 goes beyond unique identifiers and adds content to classify data and manage in certain ways. And it is very customizable.”

Pool said he has worked with Congruity360 for several years because of its technology, and is looking forward to seeing the company’s upcoming channel program. However, he said, he expects that program to be a good one based on what he has seen from Casillo.

“We are a consulting organization, and very vendor-agnostic,” he said. “We’re very selective who we partner with. From my conversations with Dave, it sounds like he’s putting together a great program. It sounds like his experience will help bring the technology to the channel. They are putting the right foundation in place.”