'7 Minutes' with Thycotic VP of Channel Sales Bob Gagnon

**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.**

Privileged account management provider Thycotic is focused on growing its channel business and stealing away market share from CyberArk and other competitors

Thycotic secures privileged account access for more than 7,500 organizations globally, including Fortune 500 enterprises. Its offerings minimize privileged credential risk, limit user privileges and control applications on endpoints and servers.

Earlier this month, the company released its 2018 Global Channel Partner Survey Report, which includes responses from more than 250 VARs, MSPs, value added distributors (VADs), direct-market resellers and SIs. According to the report, 74 percent of solution provider clients have suffered a breach in the past 12 months, and among those experiencing a breach, 55 percent did not act to fully remediate the cause of the breach and nearly one in five clients did not seek any remediation to prevent a breach from recurring.

Additionally, 62 percent of solution providers said cyberattacks were specifically targeting their clients’ privileged accounts seeking to exploit credential vulnerabilities.

“The survey suggests channel partners need to help educate their clients about the risks associated with privileged credentials,” said Charlie Patsios, Thycotic’s channel marketing director. “We are seeing a growing number of solution providers expanding their cybersecurity services around PAM protection.”

Thycotic’s Bob Gagnon

In a Q&A with Channel Partners, Bob Gagnon, Thycotic’s vice president of channel sales, talks about what his company has to offer the channel, and what changes are ahead regarding its technology and channel strategy.

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

Bob Gagnon: Our customers appreciate that we provide them with the easiest and most affordable solution to prevent cyberattacks leveraging our privilege access management (PAM) security software. We are on a global mission to help IT teams worldwide protect their organizations from hackers and malicious insiders. Passwords to our customers are more important than just about anything else and (they) want anything accessible online to be locked down with the most secure methods possible.

Each product comes with an install wizard to guide users through the process. Thycotic installation requirements are minimal and the products offer intuitive controls to help users manage their passwords and password resets from day one. Thycotic allows users to customize their password management so that it works exactly the way they want and need it to. IT teams can easily access Thycotic tools from work or home using web-based tools and a suite of…
…mobile applications. Essentially, the main reason why customers love Thycotic is because we help protect their privileged accounts while being the fastest to deploy and the easiest to use scalable enterprise-class solution offered at a very competitive price.

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

BG: Thycotic’s Channel Program can be described as simple, accessible and extremely lucrative for participating partners. We have two levels of membership – Authorized and Certified – and welcome a mix of business models from VAR and DMR, to MSP and distributor relationships. As open as the program is to admittance and availability of resources, the program aligns strongly with security focused partners. At the heart of our program, Thycotic Rewards Incentive Program ties cash rewards to a variety of enablement and pipeline building activities include completed training, lead generation, field marketing execution and revenue milestones.

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

BG: Seventy percent of new account acquisition sales is through channel partners worldwide via a channel ecosystem of 1,755 partners with (an) average deal registered margin in (the) range of 30-40 percent.

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

BG: CyberArk comes up most often as an over-complicated solution that is too cumbersome, that operational IT teams are unable to effectively deploy the solution in a meaningful optimal way without spending their way through months of customization and coding. The software requires extensive training and professional services leading to a high degree of customization. We’re hearing from many clients that the complexity has become an obstacle to adoption. When they’ve reached this conclusion (about CyberArk) they then immediately begin looking for the antithesis solution, and this is when it becomes crystal clear that Thycotic’s enterprise-class capabilities of scalability, flexibility and adaptability makes it one of the industry’s easiest to use and deploy.

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

BG: The movement of mission-critical applications to the cloud includes PAM. We believe our technology will begin to experience dramatic waves of adoption across all business spectrums, from global enterprise to the small business owner, as PAM attains ubiquity after the next three years. As long as breaches based on passwords and privilege access remain the primary way…
…to commandeer a company’s sensitive data and systems, the efficiency and simplicity of the cloud deployment model should accelerate even current rates of adoption we’re seeing today.

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

BG: We will continue to place emphasis on resources and commitments to security focused partners. The current differentiation of partner levels within (the) program should begin to widen as more benefits begin to accrue in favor of (the) partner having a very targeted cybersecurity practice.

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

BG: Thycotic is committed to growing our channel business and instilling confidence with our partners. This commitment is not only shared within the Thycotic channel team, but throughout the company from our CEO on down. Our channel is considered to be the catalyst for our continued growth, and as a result, we will continue to invest in training/enablement, lead generation, marketing and people to support these efforts.