Vendor looks to combine the various skills in channel to generate good customer outcomes
Access specialist One Identity says it has seen strong channel growth and expects this to continue, with moves to expand its ecosystem among integrators, service providers and traditional channels. On extended, long term customer projects, it aims to support partners with different skills working together. Identity and access management through partners is a big growth area, it says, and it has recognised the importance of distribution, appointing a new EMEA head of this sector.
Andrew Clarke (below), EMEA director of One Identity, says it has seen a 49% rise in global partner numbers and a rise of 44% in EMEA sales. Its ”Plus” initiative which aims to identify the most committed partners in each channel tier is designed to show those with the highest-skills to customers and is also paying off.
Investment in accreditation through hands-on development works well and reveals itself in a more confident channel, he says, and he aims to lift its abilities further. “I need to build an ecosystem with partners of all types working together.” He is committed to getting those parts of the channel with different skills working together for a better customer outcome.
Plus, it is now able to offer a new skill - analytics, through its purchase in January 2018 of Hungary’s Balabit, a provider of privileged access management (PAM), privileged account analytics and log management solutions “We bought Balabit which had complementary products. They offer analytics on top of access management, so we can talk about privilege control and compliance”.
This widens the portfolio; customers are asking about control of administration and reporting – then moving onto analytics, he says. Balabit comes in at a time the market is expanding driven by compliance.
“We have a partner-focused strategy, and are bringing the channel together. It is all about enabling the partner to have a meaningful, knowledgeable discussion with the customer. We have been putting together training - such as presales bootcamps - from the start of this year, which has a great impact. I can see the performance of the partner before and after and attribute their success to the bootcamp and marketing help.”
These bootcamps follow a web-based accreditation training, and makes them really competent and able to demonstrate proof of concept, he says. “Without that they tend to want to rely on vendor resources, so the move makes us more effective; the investment we make here enables us to scale faster since partners are more able.”
The move to co-operative channels is a fundamental change. “It doesn’t happen naturally, so we have started with partner conferences across Europe. Part of my motivation with them is to get them to work together and build relationships. I’ve seen it in other companies, but looking at the dynamics, some of the problems brought to the table could only be solved by several partners working together, plus our own services. We have people for example who have worked in an SAP environment who we can use to supplement partner skills and each country has local partner relationships manager. We can identify the needs and the skills – it is in everyone s interest to ensure the customer is happy.”
Partners can also use the One Identity Connect portal to ask questions across the company and ecosystem. He already sees all this support working and delivering better returns.
The ability of partner to get deep and wide with the portfolio helps build a supply channel and pipeline on an ongoing basis, he says. “Partners have great relationships with customers and know the market, and this combination, with technology on access management keeps the business growing.”
“We have hit a point, I think, where we are about to scale the business, in particular through distribution.” This year, it has invested in a head of distribution to work on the relationships as a consolidated distribution strategy. “It is time to get focus and build this up,” he says. “The other hire I have made is on the global systems integrators which has tended to be in-country, we need to work cross the EMEA region running those alliances with Atos, Capgemini, Fujitsu.”
“We put a lot of effort into the large integrators – building out the advisory partners and this readies the environment for the reseller partner. It is about the value proposition brought to the table.”
One Identity "Plus" partner designation is an extension to the three tier programme – this equates to a partner with experience and successful customer outcomes as well as the accreditations. “It is not automatic, but if the customer is looking at that partner as an implementer, they know they are talking to a partner with skills and experiences. It is not easy for customers to choose between partners, so the Plus label shows them who a top partner. We don’t restrict the number, but it improves the overall quality of partners.“
In specific delivery models, growth seems to be covering all sizes of customer: he has service providers offering authentication to their SMB clients as a managed service – which is interesting since at the other end of the scale, One Identity has partners such as Tieto in the Nordics who take identity management out to government.
“And we have companies in the UK who have built their own portfolio using our products. The economics of service provision means that even large enterprises and government can use small specialists.”
“It is all an area of growth for us, but the biggest growth is in privilege access management, either as a service on on-premise, with an appliance.” And delivered by partners working together, he concludes.
