'7 Minutes' With Fortanix Vice President of Products Ketan Shah

**Editor’s Note: “7 Minutes” is a feature where we ask channel executives from startups – or companies that may be new to the Channel Partners audience – a series of quick questions about their businesses and channel programs.**

Cybersecurity vendor Fortanix, which launched its first partner program early this year, is growing in all regions domestically and internationally.

Fortanix provides runtime encryption, which keeps data encrypted even when in use by applications. Its platform allows applications to process and work with encrypted data. Its Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) appliance is a cloud-ready hardware security module (HSM)-as-a-service offering.

Last week, the company revealed that it was named a “cool vendor” in Internet of Things (IoT) security by Gartner, which said “the ability to encrypt main memory with customer-controlled keys will be useful in cloud environments when handling both secrets and concerns about main memory being physically accessed, captured by another virtual machine (VM) or snapshotted.”

“We see being named a Gartner cool vendor as continuing the tremendous industry validation we’ve seen this year,” said Ambuj Kumar, Fortanix’s co-founder and CEO. “Fortanix is successfully helping organizations across a trio of compelling use cases – secure cloud adoption, trust in connected IoT devices, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) data privacy compliance.”

Fortanix’s Ketan Shah

We asked Ketan Shah, Fortanix’s vice president of products, about his company’s channel proposition and its plans for the future.

Channel Partners: Tell us what customers love about your product or service. What’s the secret selling sauce?

Ketan Shah: Fortanix’s solution is very relevant to the top-of-mind initiatives today for most organizations. The adoption of public cloud is creating new data protection challenges, specifically for encryption and key management. Fortanix SDKMS enables organizations to seamlessly adopt public, hybrid or multiple cloud for their applications while retaining strict control over their data protection policies and encryption keys.

Customers cite the following reasons of what they like about our SDKMS solution:

CP: Describe your channel program — metal levels, heavy on certifications, open or selective, unique features? Do you work with masters and/or distributors?

KS: The current focus and value are to partners that have a security practice and want to increase that business. We launched the program given two significant go-to-market/product developments: strong demand for SDKMS … (and) a channel-friendly SDKMS appliance.The FX2200 is an ideal building block to implement SDKMS in a private cloud or as a managed service.

The Fortanix Partner Program is flat in structure, with contract options for resellers and MSPs, including a referral program. The Fortanix program offers partners …

… strong incentives with attractive margins and protection, including expansionary and renewal incumbency.

Additionally, the Fortanix program includes joint marketing, comprehensive sales enablement and hands-on product training.

CP: Quick-hit answers: Percentage of sales through the channel, number of partners, average margin. Go.

KS: Fortanix is committed to driving all business through the channel. Percentage of sales through the channel is more than 90 percent. We currently have more than 15 channel partners and are expanding in all regions including internationally. The program offers strong incentives through attractive margins (30 percent) and protection for expansions and renewals.

CP: Who are your main competitors, and what makes your offering better?

KS: Thales and Gemalto. Encryption remains the most effective control for protecting data in the cloud, and with encryption key management, this becomes more critical than ever.

There are two types of competitors:

Enterprises are having to make compromises [among] security, simplicity and scalability. Fortanix recognized this gap in the market and built SDKMS.

CP: How do you think your technology portfolio will change in the next three years?

KS: Fortanix’s mission is to deliver deterministic security to applications, even if the infrastructure is compromised. Just like encryption today protects data at rest and data in motion, Fortanix runtime encryption protects applications and data while in use from external and internal threats. Fortanix is working with customers and partners to launch new applications beyond secure key management — such as secure containers, secure data processing and enabling highly sensitive workloads to run in the cloud.

CP: How do you expect your channel strategy to evolve over that time frame?

KS: Business partners are the cornerstone to Fortanix’s growth strategy to deliver innovative runtime encryption solutions to protect customers data, keys and application. Short term, we are looking to scale the business through our existing channel partner program. Long term, we will introduce specialization as we launch new solutions, as well as explore closer partnerships with MSPs that share our mission.

CP: What didn’t we ask that partners should know?

KS: Encryption has been a difficult sell for partners in the past. Specifically, legacy HSM and key management solutions have been the weakest link. The legacy solutions are complex, siloed and difficult to operate. This has led to two issues: (the) level of technical expertise required is very specialized, limiting the ability for partners to deliver the solutions and value proposition effectively; (and) customer-satisfaction levels are very low, limiting expansionary and other services opportunities.

Fortanix’s solution is simple to set up, manage and maintain. Partners can focus on being trusted security advisers by creating solutions for their customers that enhance business value and mitigate security risk.