The Background
The enterprises that trust Obrela with their security need one thing above everything else: early warning. When a new vulnerability surfaces, when an attacker finds a gap, when a threat is moving through the landscape, they need Obrela to see it first and get them the intelligence before it becomes a crisis. Obrela has built its reputation on that promise since 2010.
A global cybersecurity provider recognized in the Gartner Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response for four consecutive years and named the Most Innovative Cybersecurity Company by Cyber Defense Magazine in 2024, Obrela delivers real-time, risk-aligned security that gives businesses an umbrella of defense across their entire digital universe. Its threat intelligence team monitors the global landscape continuously, identifying vulnerabilities and publishing advisories that help organizations stay ahead of what is coming.
Ayman Badawi, Director of Customer Success, Channels & Partnerships for Obrela’s Middle East and North Africa region, has been a HubSpot user for over five years. When he joined Obrela three years ago, he saw the platform being used primarily for marketing and knew it could do more. "I changed the narrative," he said. "It’s good for marketing, but we can leverage a lot more than just that."
Across MENA, Obrela works through a network of regional partners, each of whom serves their own roster of enterprise customers. When a new threat emerges, those partners are the conduit. They carry Obrela’s intelligence forward to the organizations that need it most. Speed is the whole point — the faster intelligence moves through the chain, the better protected everyone becomes. Getting the right warning to the right people, fast enough to matter, was something Obrela had not cracked.
The Challenge
When Critical Intelligence Gets Stuck in a Manual Process
For the enterprises that Obrela’s partners serve, a delayed security advisory is a window of exposure — immediate and consequential. Every hour between a known vulnerability and a warned customer is an hour an attacker can use. For the partners themselves, staying ahead of the threat landscape is core to their value. That relationship depends on timely, relevant intelligence landing in the right inbox, not buried in a bulk email.
Badawi understood this acutely. "If it’s a bulk email, the chances that the partner will read it is slimmer," he said. "But when the email is coming from me, they read it."
The problem was that sending personalized, one-to-one advisories to all partners every time a new threat emerged could not scale. With multiple advisories going out each week, the manual process cost roughly two hours of effort per advisory across the team. Four people, coordinating, formatting, sending. "You cannot rely on yourself or the other people managing the partners to make sure that every advisory goes out one by one," Badawi explained. "That becomes an impossible mission."
When the advisory did go out as a plain bulk email, something else was lost too. Partners would forward it on to their own customers without any Obrela branding. By the time the intelligence reached the end customer, Obrela’s name was nowhere on it.
A Team Running Without Visibility
Inside the customer success function, a parallel problem was growing. Obrela tracked account health manually, pulling data into Excel, building reports in Power BI, and relying on each CSM’s individual read of their accounts. Without an automated, consistent view of what was actually happening across relationships, risks stayed hidden.
"Account health was tracked manually across spreadsheets and individual judgment calls, so risk signals didn’t always surface early enough to act on," Badawi said. "Without a consistent, shared view across the team, it was easy for a problem to go unnoticed until it was closer to a crisis point that we’d like to avoid."
The CSM team was also missing a critical layer of signal: contact-level sentiment. An account might look stable at the company level while a key decision-maker was quietly frustrated and driving a renewal conversation in the wrong direction. "Maybe the overall customer is happy, but I have a decision maker that’s not happy," Badawi noted. That kind of risk stayed hidden until it was already a problem. Obrela’s ability to protect its customers and keep them protected was being held back by manual processes that could not scale.
The Solution
From Blank Canvas to a Live Agent, Without an Engineering Team
When HubSpot introduced Agent Builder, Badawi did not need to migrate data, stitch together tools, or file a request with an engineering team. Everything Obrela needed was already in HubSpot: customer data, deal history, partner records, communication logs, all connected through a Salesforce integration. The agents could start working immediately.
"Having the data in HubSpot helped a lot," Badawi said. "I no longer need to pass data across. It’s all there."
Badawi built his first agent in roughly two weeks, describing what he needed in plain language and letting Agent Builder configure it from the CRM data already in the account. He built it himself, in plain language, without writing a line of code or looping in outside help. "Because I come from a development background it was not that complicated," he said, "but with the latest updates in Agent Builder, someone without a technical background could absolutely build their own agent. It became very easy. Very straightforward."
His first build was the partner advisory agent. Now, when Obrela’s threat intelligence team identifies a new vulnerability, the advisory lands in a dedicated HubSpot ticketing channel. The agent reads it, identifies which of the 24 regional partners are subscribed to receive it, and sends a personalized, one-to-one email from Badawi to each of them automatically, on a trigger, the moment the advisory arrives — no scheduling, no coordination, no lag. The advisory goes out in a branded Obrela format so that even when a partner forwards the intelligence to their own customers, Obrela’s name travels with it.
"The day I do not send an email out, I get a call from the partner asking what happened," Badawi said. "So to make sure that the whole thing is progressing normally, I had to build this man in the middle."
Building a Live View of Every Customer Relationship
From there, Badawi built a suite of additional custom agents focused on customer health, each one targeting a specific blind spot the team had been working around manually. A weekly agent runs across all active accounts, analyzing email sentiment, open support tickets, engagement data, and signals of frustration. It produces an AI health score from 0 to 10, with specific flags and recommended CSM actions, then pushes the output directly into HubSpot as a field visible to leadership. The report goes out to the full team automatically, every week, without anyone building or distributing it by hand.
A separate agent runs monthly at the contact level, checking sentiment for individual decision-makers and champions rather than the account as a whole. "I run this on a monthly basis because it gives you a lot of insights that you cannot keep track of everything manually," Badawi said. "I might be running 10 to 15 accounts. I cannot be on top of them all the time. It’s physically impossible."
A third agent handles sales-to-CS handovers. When a deal closes in Salesforce, the agent automatically pulls together everything known about the new account and creates a structured briefing for the assigned CSM. No handover meeting, no gaps in context. "I try not to open Salesforce at all," Badawi said. "I want everything centralized."
The Transformation
Customers Protected. Partners Engaged. Pipeline Created.
Before Agent Builder, the partner advisory process cost the team roughly two hours of manual effort every time a new threat needed to go out. The coordination, formatting, and follow-up alone ate hours. Now the entire process runs automatically the moment an advisory is received. The intelligence moves faster, it arrives personalized, and it carries Obrela’s brand all the way to the end customer.
The results were immediate. In the first two months after the advisory agent went live, it generated three to four new prospect deals per month through the partner network — organizations that had never heard of Obrela before. Their partner forwarded an advisory, it arrived in Obrela’s format, and they wanted to know more. "Even if you sign one, it’s great," Badawi said. "And these are coming out of nowhere. People that you didn’t even think about."
The weekly health reporting process went from three hours to five minutes. The data builds itself. The report sends itself. CSMs stopped working from individual instinct and started working from a shared, consistent view of every account. Churn signals that used to slip through undetected started surfacing early enough to do something about.
A New Model for What One Team Can Do
The metrics tell part of the story. Take away the manual overhead, and a small team can suddenly handle a lot more. "Instead of having 20 accounts, you can actually handle 30 if we reduce the time needed for account workload," Badawi said.
Leadership began rethinking what a tech-touch model could look like at scale. "We started thinking about having some kind of a tech touch via automation," Badawi explained. "Small customers you might not need someone to always get engaged with. You can automate a lot of things." Agents that respond to customer questions through a knowledge base, sequenced outreach that runs from the assigned CSM without anyone writing it manually, health signals that escalate to a manager automatically when a score drops. The team keeps finding more it can take on.
Automation was always a means to an end for Obrela. It was the ability to reach every partner, protect every customer, and make sure the intelligence that keeps businesses safe actually arrives in time. "The agents help me know things I might not have had any idea about," Badawi said. "It’s no longer about hoping problems go away. It’s about seeing them clearly, early, and acting."
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