‘The UK market presents a tremendous amount of upside’: Illumio on network expansion

The vendor’s channel leaders discuss key territories, evolving partner base, and MDF updates

As most of the channel is knees deep into Q1, cybersecurity vendors are updating their strategies to remain attractive to partners.

To better understand what the future brings to zero trust cybersecurity (ZTS) vendor Illumio – or rather what the company brings to the future - CRN attended the London leg of the company’s world tour.

Alongside Illumio’s CEO Andrew Rubin, CRN spoke with two of the organisation’s channel leaders; Todd Palmer, SVP of global partner sales and alliances, and Pete Wilson, director of channel sales EMEA.

The duo discussed the importance of the channel in its growth strategy, its relationships with global partners, as well as channel tracks and MDF revamps.

Channel relations

“The partner ecosystem is critical to our go-to-market model,” says Palmer.

“Not only does it help us with reach in large geographies, but it also helps us in terms of breadth of skillset and capabilities.”

While “a decent chunk” of Illumio’s business is brought by its partner community, the channel doesn’t represent 100 per cent of the vendor’s activity.

The company did not disclose any percentage regarding revenue coming from the channel but states it does “almost 100 per cent of [its] business with and through partners.”

On the EMEA front, Wilson tells CRN that partners help Illumio “reach customers in each of the separate geographies and countries to support [it] in scaling the business.”

“For example, the Middle East is very different culturally and geographically distant from us, so we absolutely need partners to be able to support us in the region,” he says.

Traditional and new partners

Illumio boasts a “pretty diverse” ecosystem.

According to Palmer, the company “typically gravitates toward the more advisory, consulting led partners, versus the legacy global systems integrators that operate technology.”

“We want our partners to have a point of view, an opinion, and a solution offering that they're selling, as opposed to just operating.

“The cloud providers, the hyperscalers, they go to market with us, or we go to market with them.

“We have technology alliance partners that play a critical role in what we do.”

The SVP of global partner sales and alliances adds that MSPs play a crucial part in Illumio’s partner ecosystem.

According to him, “it’s hard to tell what the percentage of [Illumio’s] revenue represents the MSP business, because [he hasn't] met a single company out there that's not building a managed service.”

“Managed services are vitally important for classic resellers, as well as for large advisory and consulting companies, because it's sticky for their customers and that ensures they can be successful.”

Wilson sees the same phenomenon happening in Europe, where “all the partners” he spoke to “typically have a managed service part of their business, but they may not necessarily run or operate that for Illumio yet.”

“We also have some partners that are already running managed services or wrapping managed services around Illumio.

“It's a growth area for our business. We're seeing more and more partners look towards services and managed services going forward.”

The company is also planning on integrating new partners like cloud marketplaces, says Palmer.

“I'm not sure I've ever met a company that doesn't buy something through those marketplaces.

“They're a critically important part of the IT ecosystem today.

“Many of our customers have pre-bought credits with all of them.”

He adds that the company now goes to market through Microsoft and AWS.

“All of our partners are also figuring out how to work with them in their go to market model.

“They've become vital to not only our business, but to our integrators as well.”

The company also has technology alliances with companies like Armis, Netskope, and Wiz.

In total, the company counts 600 partners, a third of which are in EMEA.

The importance of the UK and EMEA

The UK represents “a huge market” for the firm, alongside Germany and France.

“The UK is a market where there's a tremendous amount of upside,” says Palmer.

“It’s a market that is still growing rapidly, and that’s where we have our biggest headcount.

“There's a bunch of hiring that's going on there as well.”

The company states it is soon planning on hiring significantly in UKI, DACH, META, and the Nordics.

In the foreseeable future, the company is not yet certain “to spend its focus into a certain territory in EMEA,” according to Wilson.

“There are some key territories where we've got sales resources, like in the UK, the Baltics, the Nordics, DACH, and the Middle East.

“We don't, for example, have them yet in Italy.

“This doesn't mean we're not interested in this country; we can sell there, but there's a lot of room in the opportunity we have in other regions.

“I think in time you'll see us expand across all of them.”

The company also strives to make this expansion mainly through partnerships and is not “acquiring organisations or entities out there to go to market.”

In the UK, the company works with VARs, GSIs, and MSPs such as BT, WWT, Softcat, Bytes, CDW, Core to Cloud, Cyber Vigilance, and Ignition Technology.

More broadly in Europe, the company has relationships with Accenture, Kyndryl, Computacenter, ACEN, ACKnowledge, Centhys, i-Tracing, Bitsiel, Cefiros, MIEL, NewAge, Rubynet, Sinthera, and Infinigate.

Partner track and MDF

As the company recently rejuvenated its Enlighten partner programme launched in 2017, Palmer touches on whether the channel should expect to see further changes in the near future.

“We did a massive overhaul this fiscal year by completely revamping the programme, launching our MSP specialisation, revamping our professional services specialisation for sales, pre-sales and post-sales resources, and launching our tech alliances programme.

“What we're tweaking now is tools and resources to help us with x, y, and z.

“It’s additive from here, because we put a good foundation in place.

“We've built the tools and resources to help our partners build a business with Illumio.

“Not only can it be very profitable from a margin perspective, but there's also a tremendous amount of services, work, implementation and integration, services, management and operational based services.”

The company has also doubled its “marketing, MDF, and business development fund (BDF) budget this year” to not only train and enable partners help partners, but also “help them drive pipeline for their business.”

“That's what I think partners look for.

“If they're going to invest in Illumio, we want to make sure we can invest in them.

“We also have exponentially more marketing campaigns and assets available to our partners than we did a year ago.

“We built all the marketing materials, collateral, email templates, call scripts for their inside sellers, things that they could pick up, customise and execute.

“We love it when our partners want to market with us to their customers.

“Partners have choices on who they want to go to market with. They choose to go to market with Illumio.”