Organisations are now juggling an average of 29 cloud services as they accelerate the move to digitally transform and increase cloud use in 2020. Security is a key part of this; Paris-listed Thales is working to integrate these offerings and set itself as a core part of a partner ecosystem, particularly across new markets like Blockchain, Cloud, DevOps, IoT and Code Signing.
Gary Marsden (pictured), Senior Director, Data Protection, Thales tells IT Europa that things are changing fast: “My role is to take the on-premise technologies and turn them into cloud solutions to take us forward. We can’t keep on doing what we were doing before in term of initiatives and channel recruitment. It is a big challenge. This summer has seen a phenomenal move to cloud – and to secure what they are doing in the cloud. This will continue as it has triggered organisations to take a real look at infrastructures and secure them.”
In response to a changing market, Thales has announced an expansion of its technology partner ecosystem which now includes more than 300 partners and 500 technology integrations, particularly enabling more organisations to integrate its data encryption, hardware security modules, key management and access management techs.
“The announcement is all about how we have kept up by changing the people we work with – two years ago our vendors were traditional on-premise – where we sold on-premise hsm and key management solutions. Look at the growth of organisation – F5 for example which now has cloud - and we also need to look at the new cloud services.”
“Many more cloud services have been added this year. With its long standing with Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, Thales understands where the market is going, not just from a technology perspective but in a commercial sense as well,” he says.
That changes a lot of the dynamics for channels and for Thales. “They are building those infrastructures – many more using Teams for example, and other collaboration tools and looking at the need for security.”
“Today we have two sides to partnerships – tech partners where we can add our innovations to theirs and jointly build a market. The other side is those service providers – large and small - who provide the value added services or in the mid-tier.”
Ecosystems and managing them is an issue: “We have built 500 or so integrations and building that ecosystem has taken time. We will build the tools – that is why we have teams focused on finding those partners we need to partner with to deliver value as we move up the use-case stacks.”
“In coming weeks we will add more to the Accelerate Partner Network activities and this will be global - to look at finding new cloud-oriented partners and provide solutions for the mid-market. The mid-tier is where we are finding customers want security solutions without having to pay a lot of money upfront. There will be a lot more on this in the coming months,” he says.
But this is not just a question for large companies, he says. “I expect we will see more start-ups coming in – we are increasingly hearing about people building their own technologies that will grow with remote workforces and development teams to work on remote solutions. It gives us a new opportunity to work with them.”
“I believe that this year means there are a lot more organisations using cloud and it will mean a lot of European channels looking at how they associate themselves with cloud. A lot stood back but some smart channels have moved, some have dabbled, but we are going to see a lot of change from organisations who want to be part of it or lose out.”
“Relationships with big cloud providers is one thing, but also by working with smaller service providers is how we are helping join the dots where there are a lot of good applications. We are helping bring them into the partner channel and help them take advantage of the moves without having to make a big jump. We can provide them with the relationships and it can be a win-win.”
Hear more from Gary Marsden and Thales at the XaaS Summit 2020 virtual event on September 9 which will explore the latest trends in the growth of this new market, the critical role the channel is playing in its development and the new opportunities being created.
