Lieberman Software rebuilds European channel from scratch

'US-centric' privileged identity management vendor claims it can become serious European player following expansion drive

Security vendor Lieberman Software claims a European expansion drive is helping to silence criticism that it is a US-centric firm lacking a robust channel strategy.

Since touching down last August, the privileged identity management specialist has built a team of six European staff, rewritten its channel programme and signed 20 new formal channel partnerships.

Lieberman's "limited partner ecosystem" was flagged up as a weakness in a recent sector report by analyst Kuppingercole, but recently installed EMEA channel director Roy Duckles claimed that perception is no longer valid.

"It's recognised we're really pushing the channel piece," said Duckles. "We've done a lot in six months. We've gone from nothing to having a fully fledged partner programme with all the collateral and training courses and have tried to get a mix of partners."

Few of Lieberman's incumbent resellers – which included UK outfit Accumuli – survived the restructure, Duckles revealed.

"I used a process called KICK: keep, incentivise, consolidate or kill," he said. "There was a lot of killing going on [in] about December. I started reprofiling existing partners and found out our main partner in the Netherlands was just two people."

New UK partner signings include public sector specialist Bull Information Systems; Voodoo Technology, which serves the retail banking vertical; education specialist LAN3 and ZeroDayLab, which specialises in finance and insurance. Exclusive Networks was brought on as sole distributor in most countries in January.

Duckles claimed that momentum is building behind the privileged identity market – which he estimated is currently worth $100m (£59m) to $200m – following large-scale breaches at retailers such as Target and Tesco. According to Kuppingercole, Lieberman is a "clear leader" in the market alongside rival CyberArk.

"Edward Snowden was a great advert for us," he added. "He wasn't a genius. He sat down with his colleagues and said: ‘I just need to get a bit of information from one of our servers: what's your password', as he knew they'd never change their passwords."

Duckles added: "What's quite important is we don't have a professional services team. We empower our partners to promote their own professional services and that's quite key because our competitors actively compete with partners on professional services."