It’s industry standard for vendors to hand out annual awards, and Centrify is no different. The Centrify Channel Partner Network (CCPN) was launched in January of 2014 and is focused heavily on core strategic partners. Last year, we were able to launch our own CCPN awards program to honor partners that have embraced our efforts and program. Now that we are in our second year of awarding partners, there are some very obvious metrics that we have seen that drive success selling and managing Centrify’s products. There is a very high percentage of our partner community that have met the minimum requirements of their partner levels, as well as consistently working with our sales and technical teams on opportunities and marketing activities. This is all goodness and drives great results, but the partners that are seeing the most significant growth are the ones that truly understand and execute on some very simple things. This year’s CCPN award winners have really shown momentum and success by understanding and focusing in these areas:
Understanding the Centrify Platform
Our platform is what truly differentiates us from any competitor. Yes, we compete head-to-head on a daily basis, but when our overall platform and strategy is articulated, it’s a no-brainer. It’s not just about single-sign-on (SSO), secure access to servers and on premise applications, least privilege access, vaulting passwords to network devices, on-boarding and off-boarding employees and contractors, enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for critical systems or applications, or enterprise mobility management (EMM). It’s about ALL OF THESE. The Centrify Identity Platform is truly a next generation identity management solution that addresses each one of these very relevant and important needs. This creates many “land and expand” opportunities for partners. Whereas many of our competitors focus on solving some of the above, a customer would need four or more products to satisfy all of them. We can address all of this in a scalable and reliable platform. Customers can grow by deploying Centrify in small areas and continually adding more to satisfy the optimal identity management solution for an organization. All with one vendor.
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Bundling and attaching Centrify with other solutions
Every SaaS application, server, network or storage device has an individual identity for each system or cloud instance. This has proven to be a very effective entry point for partners to introduce Centrify as a complementary technology when selling these solutions. Managing secure access to servers to increase security is a great discussion to have when selling them, along with network and storage devices. Another great topic to discuss is the need to completely eliminate the need to share or store passwords to these devices, as well as be able to audit and replay what someone did while logged into that system — all of which helps keep the auditors happy.
Also, if a customer is purchasing 500 licenses to Office365, Dropbox, Concur, ServiceNow or multiple of these applications, that is 500+ new user names and passwords that have to be created. Throwing Centrify into the conversation to tell a customer how they can eliminate this process entirely, provision users automatically and provide SSO to the application, creates a much more secure connection, as well as enhancing user (and administrator) productivity. Furthermore, Centrify eliminates the potential for those 500+ user names and passwords to ever be compromised. In fact, we have a great post from our Director of Product Marketing, Chris Webber that focuses entirely on this topic titled, Every Password Has Been Stolen. Now What.
Embracing the methodology that identity is truly the new perimeter
Mandiant has confirmed that 100% of the recent high-profile breaches were due to compromised credentials; OPM, Target, Home Depot, Cox and Neiman Marcus are just few names. Hackers are targeting all users to gain access into an infrastructure. Whether it’s the sales person logging in from a Starbucks to access his company CRM, a contractor that has VPN access to critical servers or devices or a human resources administrator who has access to HR systems, all users are being targeted. Since most applications and devices are accessed through mobile devices and outside of the network, it is critical to focus on securing the specific individuals accessing these systems and applications. Individuals may have many different usernames and passwords, which can lead to the reuse of the same password for a lot of different tools and systems. Moreover, since login credentials are easily forgotten, it also creates sharing and even “post-it” notes of their credentials. Our partners have been extremely effective by embracing this increasing problem and differentiating themselves from their competition by bringing a new conversation to their customers and prospects. The firewall is no longer the perimeter; it’s the user’s identities that need to be secured.
Our partners are critical to our success and we are happy to announce this year’s winners who demonstrate the above. We don’t just hand out these awards for revenue attainment alone. We hand out awards to organizations that look at Centrify as a strategic business partner, utilize all of the tools and resources we offer, meet program requirements and work jointly with our sales and technical teams.
Click here to the view the full list of Centrify Channel Partner Network award winners.