Marketplace
How Value Aligners Vets Vendors and Matches Solutions to Risk
Last updated
Every finding in a Value Aligners assessment ends with a recommended fix. This page explains which vendors can appear, how we rank them and how we earn money, so an MSP can decide how much to trust a recommendation.
Each statement here describes how the platform works today. When that changes, this page changes with it, and the change log at the bottom says what changed and why.
Who can be listed
Every vendor submission is checked against five minimum requirements, and a person at Value Aligners reviews it before the vendor is approved. No vendor is approved automatically.
1. Verifiable company identity. A real, checkable business: a legal entity name, a live company website and a business domain we can confirm.
2. An accountable business contact. At least one named owner on a business email who answers for the relationship, security and support.
3. Core agreements accepted. Acceptance of our baseline marketplace agreements and governance commitments: an NDA, an MOU and the platform terms.
4. Trust and notification commitments. A commitment to the core security and incident notification practices that buyer trust depends on.
5. A clear, honest offering. A described product or service in a recognised category, with consistent, non-contradictory, non-placeholder data.
A submission that misses any of these is flagged to the reviewer as a blocker. A contact on a personal email domain, a contact email whose domain does not match the company website, or vague commitments and offering claims are flagged for closer review rather than accepted.
How a finding becomes a recommendation
1. The finding. It comes either from an external scan of the client's public domains or from the client's own assessment answers. We keep which one it was all the way through, so "we detected no DMARC record" and "the client told us they have no EDR" are never presented as the same kind of evidence.
2. The category. Each finding maps to a security category, for example email authentication or endpoint detection and response.
3. The ranking. Within that category, solutions are scored on fit. The strength of the category match carries half of the score. The rest comes from customer rating, whether the listing is a real one (complete, not a placeholder, and with a price, pricing tiers or a quote-only basis), fit to the client's size, fit to the client's budget and an independent vendor-quality score. Those smaller factors decide the order between solutions in the same category.
4. The order you see. Opportunities are ordered by the severity of the findings behind them, so the most serious problems come first.
Does a fee change the ranking?
No. The ranking described above has no commission or fee input. What the MSP and Value Aligners would earn is worked out only after the ranking is done, from the catalog price, the seat count and the agreed commission rate. A category with no price shows no dollar figure; we never fill one in with an estimate.
Three things we disclose so you can judge for yourself.
Where we name a vendor in an MSP's opportunity report, we hold an agreement with it. We name it only against the gaps it answers, and we may earn a fee when it is bought. Vendors we hold no agreement with are not named there.
Every opportunity also names the vendor-neutral solution type, for example email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) or endpoint detection and response (EDR), so the MSP can fill it with a vendor it already resells.
An empty category is shown as empty. When no vetted vendor covers a finding, the report says so. It never fills the slot with a near-miss product from another category.
Frequently asked questions
Can a vendor pay to rank higher?
No. There is no paid placement in the ranking. Its inputs are the category match, customer rating, whether the listing is real and complete, fit to the client's size and budget, and an independent vendor-quality score.
Who approves a vendor?
A person at Value Aligners. The five minimum requirements flag problems for the reviewer; they never approve or reject a vendor on their own.
Why do I sometimes see a solution type but no vendor?
Because no vetted vendor covers that category yet. You can use any vendor you already work with for it.
How does Value Aligners make money?
We earn a fee when a client buys through the marketplace, and the MSP that made the sale earns a commission. Both are worked out after matching, and neither affects which solution is recommended.
Change log
Published.
Why: To show MSPs and vendors how vendors are vetted and how recommendations are ranked.