Tanium Converge 2022: Risk Assessment Represents Big Opportunity for Partners
Partners and customers aren't fully utilizing Tanium.
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Tanium
Tanium‘s Todd Palmer said all organizations are concerned about third-party risks and vulnerabilities that are being entered out there.
“And no one has a really good answer or solution for it,” he said. “SBOM gives our partners the opportunity to go into every single one of their customers who have recently called them about log4j or whatever vulnerability that was just announced, and say, ‘Hey, there’s a way that I can actually help you out, uncover and find out whether or not you have any of these things in any of your underlying applications.’ They’re also starting to create some services around it. I can create a service, a managed service, and operate it as an assessment if a customer doesn’t want to buy it. So our partners are either taking the message out to their customers or they’re creating services around it.”
Nearly three years ago when Palmer joined Tanium, 35-40% of the company’s business was sold through partners. Today, that percentage is 85-90%.
“We’re experiencing the fastest new customer growth we’ve seen in the company’s history,” Palmer said. “And between 50% and 60% of those are driven by our partners. Our partners are making big investments in either selling Tanium out to their customers or building services powered by Tanium that they’re selling to their customers. So our partners are the catalyst for that new customer growth.”
Any prospect or company in the marketplace has hundreds of tools to secure their environment and to protect themselves from breaches, Palmer said. However, none of them feel any safer today than they did three or four years ago.
“We provide 100% visibility into those environments and we allow our customers to be able to consolidate some of those tools onto a single platform that gives them total visibility into their environment and total control of their environment as well,” he said. “There’s a big need in the marketplace just given the pure number of vulnerabilities and risks there are out there, and the complexity of the environment that this industry has provided for those companies out there.”
Secondly, Tanium also offers Tanium as a service, its cloud product, Palmer said.
“We did that for a couple of reasons,” he said. “No. 1, the entire IT industry is transforming that way. But we noticed that the midsize customers out there had the exact same challenges the largest enterprises did, and yet our product wasn’t really packaged or priced appropriately for them. And so we launched this cloud version of Tanium that requires no infrastructure. We repriced and repackaged it. We built an ecosystem of partners that can help us bring this and serve that community. And so most of the growth is coming because we have a product now that’s easy for companies to consume for that midsize enterprise. We’ve always done a fantastic job selling to the largest of the large companies, but we never really went down market. The release of our cloud product and the launch of our partner program has really helped us grow the business substantially.”
This year, Tanium‘s top two partner program priorities are making it more predictable and margin rich for partners to build a practice and sell Tanium, Plamer said.
“So we’ve repackaged and repriced a lot to make sure that it’s consistent with higher margin opportunity for our partners when they’re reselling Tanium,” he said. “The other thing that we’ve done is services is obviously a very important part of all of our partners’ offerings. Tanium can be used to build assessment-based services and sell them to their customers. There’s lots of implementation and migration work, and then there’s a lot of opportunity to either manage or operate on behalf of the customer. We’re taking all of our knowledge and content, and years of learning, and packaging it up for partners. So it’s these are five to six assessment-based or consulting services that you could create leveraging Tanium, and we’re going to give you the product for free to do it. Here’s the highest demand integration or implementation services that our customers ask for, and here’s the run books and the training materials for it. So there’s a huge amount of work around how do we help our partners build services powered by Tanium or help customers operate and manage Tanium.”
Tanium is looking for more feedback from its MSP advisory council, Palmer said.
“We want a bunch of information from them about changes that they want to see in our licensing and pricing model,” he said. “Not only that, but what is the change that they want to see in our products to make it easier for them to manage hundreds of customers at the same time with the same instance of Tanium. So we’re looking for a bunch of feedback there. We’re also looking for a bunch of feedback on our pricing and packaging. We do a good job of listening and we don’t think we’re right all the time. And we’ve got over 300 partners that are in attendance that we’re going to be able to get feedback on how we need to adjust our program, how we need to engage better in the field. It’s just constant improvement that we’re trying to do.”
Tanium wants partners to focus more on the company’s risk assessment, Palmer said.
“It’s really an unbelievable tool and value that they can add to their customers,” he said. “And the second thing is we offer something called a services design workshop that we created. It’s a two-day session where we sit in a room with our partners, understand the services that they currently sell and figure out what complementary services we can help them develop and take to market. So my big ask for our partners is to take a look at the Tanium risk assessment and take us our up on our offer to do a services design workshop with your teams because both of them could be big, largely beneficial to your business.”
None of the company’s customers maximize Tanium to the fullest extent and no partners leverage the modules to Tanium’s full extent, Palmer said.
“If you’re an MSP or an MSSP, and you have vulnerability and risk type services you’re selling to your customer, wouldn’t it be great to say, ‘These are your vulnerabilities and risks, and I also have a service that I could provide to patch all those vulnerabilities for you as well,'” he said. “They can use Tanium not only on the vulnerabilities and risk, but they can use it for patching as well. And they can use it as providing a benchmark to them on a quarterly basis to tell them how they’re doing. So it’s just educating them on the different things they can do with the investments that they’ve already made.”
None of the company’s customers maximize Tanium to the fullest extent and no partners leverage the modules to Tanium’s full extent, Palmer said.
“If you’re an MSP or an MSSP, and you have vulnerability and risk type services you’re selling to your customer, wouldn’t it be great to say, ‘These are your vulnerabilities and risks, and I also have a service that I could provide to patch all those vulnerabilities for you as well,'” he said. “They can use Tanium not only on the vulnerabilities and risk, but they can use it for patching as well. And they can use it as providing a benchmark to them on a quarterly basis to tell them how they’re doing. So it’s just educating them on the different things they can do with the investments that they’ve already made.”
At this week’s Tanium Converge 2022, Tanium is encouraging partners to dive deeply into its risk assessment and incorporate it into their businesses.
That’s according to Todd Palmer, Tanium’s senior vice president of global partner sales. Tanium Converge 2022 is taking place virtually and in-person in Austin, Texas.
Tanium’s Todd Palmer
“This is the first time we’ve done Converge in person in a couple of years now, so needless to say we’re unbelievably excited,” he said. “We have over 1,000 people in attendance, and over 300 of them are partners. We’re going in depth on services opportunities and the areas that we’re investing in to help our partners build out services.”
SBOM and Benchmark
The latest Tanium solutions for partners are Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and Benchmark. SBOM provides real-time visibility into complex software environments. Benchmark provides industry comparisons for common enterprise risk, security and operations metrics.
“We’re unbelievably excited about SBOM,” Palmer said. “We understand all of these vulnerabilities that are started because of third-party companies. And think of SBOM as a quick way to ascertain if any of your applications in your environment were written or contains any of that vulnerable code that’s out there. Think of the back of a cereal box. You can quickly find out all the ingredients in a cereal. That’s what Tanium does with SBOM. So you’re going to see a lot about SBOM because we just announced that. And then not too long ago we also just released Benchmark as well. So we’ll be hearing a lot about that and you’ll be hearing a lot about the growing partnership that we have with Microsoft and a lot of the integration that we have with different Microsoft security tools as well.”
Risk Assessment
With Benchmark, Tanium has created a new risk assessment tool, Palmer said.
“It’s packaged and built so a partner can take it quickly and plug it into a customer’s environment or a prospect’s environment,” he said. “It runs for about a week and it comes back and provides them a documented report that you can hand to a CIO, a CISO or a board of directors, and it says this is your risk score and this is how you compare to all other companies of your similar shape or size or in the same industry that you’re in. So you have a risk vulnerability ranking and this is how are you doing better or worse than some of your peers. We also tell you these are some things that you can do right now to actually reduce that risk score and vulnerability you have in your environment. Hence the name Benchmark.”
Tanium gives partners 100% of this content and they can customize it and co-brand it, and they can either use it as a pre-sales tool or they could customize it and charge for it, Palmer said.
“It’s unbelievably valuable and a great tool that our partners are utilizing more and more now than they ever have,” he said.
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from Tanium Converge 2022.
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