Tanium is helping partners build more services capabilities

The cybersecurity vendor talked to CRN about where it is focusing over the next 12 months

Endpoint management specialist Tanium is investing in its partners to be able to offer more services.

CRN caught up with the cybersecurity vendor's SVP of global partner sales, Todd Palmer to hear more about Tanium's plans over the coming year.

Last year the group launched what was called Tanium-as-a-service. The name has since changed to Tanium Cloud and it provides zero infrastructure.

"Every customer likes this zero infrastructure type solution. But what was great about it is it really opened up an opportunity for us to come down to what we call the emerging enterprise between 1,000 endpoints and 10,000 endpoints," Palmer explained.

"Historically, that's a market that we hadn't really gone after. And so we launched Tanium Cloud and that emerging enterprise business was the fastest growing part of our business globally.

"Same for us in Europe with the largest year for new customer growth in Tanium's history and the emerging enterprise business far exceeded our expectations."

Palmer added that the reason behind the launch was to make it more margin rich for Tanium partners to sell in the emerging and enterprise space, as well as to be more predictable from a margin perspective.

"We repriced and repackaged those solutions to the partner ecosystem. And then last year, we spent a considerable amount of time and resources building out our partners services capabilities.

"We were a software company not a services company, we'd rather have our partners delivering a whole host of services, and we spent a tonne of time and energy building run books and playbooks and training materials and training guidelines and workshops to help our partners build up their services capabilities."

Globally, around 92 per cent of all of the transactions Tanium sells are sold with and through its partners.

Tanium's 2023 growth strategy

With the launch of Tanium Cloud last year, Palmer updated CRN on Tanium's upcoming announcements for 2023.

"Certificate Manager is launching this year, and so is Digital Experience Manager, which is a totally new emerging market out there that all of us are excited about," he said.

"We're excited about the new technologies and new capabilities. But the thing is that from a partner perspective, it's three areas that we are laser focused on - continuing to help our partners build out their services capabilities and their services offerings, and then to help them bring those to market."

"Why?," he asked, "number one, it represents a great opportunity for our partners, but number two, it helps our customers maximise the investment they have made in Tanium and it helps them extend that investment by integrating Tanium and other applications in their environments, and that's what partners do.

"The second thing is we are continuing to revamp our technical tools and our technical training for our partners, providing more access to them for lab gear and demo environments.

"We're starting to take a lot of these things on the road as well too. So that's the second thing, continued emphasis on technical training and certifications.

"The third thing is we continue to add to our MDF and VDF budgets because last year we did a fantastic job of marketing with and through our partners and we'll continue to accelerate that."

Palmer explained to CRN that Tanium's partner programme differs from the usual tier-based programmes seen in the channel.

"Ours is business plan-based. We don't want to partner with everybody under the sun. We want to be very selective on who we go to market with and we fundamentally believe that every partner's business is different.

"We want to make sure that the investments we make and each partner is tailored to what's going to benefit that partner the most.

"They might not be a marketing organisation, so we shouldn't invest in MDF dollars, but they're highly tactical and capable so let's invest in these types of resources and these types of dollars.

"So ours is business plan based and so we can customise the investments that we make and how we can help them and help us be more successful."

Partner pain points

Palmer told CRN that rather than the usual aches and pains communicated to vendors from partners, Tanium instead hears more of what partners want from them.

"I'm not sure if it's a pain point, but what they want is more from us," he said.

"More access to resources, more tools and materials, they want help drive even more pipeline and opportunities together.

"If you asked me that question a year ago, they would have said, ‘we need to continue to refine our pricing and packaging' for partners that want to resell and partners that want to provide managed services. But we tackled that last year. And so I think it's just more is what we hear this year."