Ivanti is developing a unified partner program that will merge its own channel with those of MobileIron and Pulse Secure, two of the vendor’s biggest and most recent acquisitions.
The new program, which is scheduled to roll out mid-year, will arm partners to cross-sell all of the products in Ivanti’s growing lineup of IT management and security solutions.
“By July 1, we’re going to have everything in place that will allow them to effectively sell across the portfolio,” says Erik Randles, senior vice president of global channels and alliances at Ivanti, who stepped into that role last month.
The new program will emphasize consistency with familiar tools and processes wherever possible, he continues. “We actually have an initiative internally that is focused around minimizing disruption to the channel partners, because they’re actively engaging with us to identify and close new business and we want to make sure that we’re not distracting them from doing that effectively.”
The program that debuts this summer will be just a down payment, he adds, on a larger, longer-term vision. Automation functionality powered by Ivanti’s own Neurons platform, for example, is set to arrive in the future.
“We’re looking to incorporate our own technology and solutions into this program so that we have the ability to be best in class in terms of self-service on some of those more repetitive tasks and questions the partners have,” Randles explains.
Ivanti will redeploy the money that automation frees up toward efforts aimed at maximizing the loyalty and effectiveness of the vendor’s top-tier resellers. “We want to increase the investment and make those partners that are committed and invested in Ivanti more successful,” Randles says.
Enabling consolidated, cross-brand management of Ivanti products will be another ongoing priority for the new partner program.
“One of the things that we’re hearing from customers and partners alike is that they want to be able to manage that experience in a very simple and comprehensive way, because in doing so through that integration and single pane of glass management capabilities, you’re actually helping the customer and the partner deliver value, not only in terms of the technology but also the operational cost of the business,” Randles says.
Though partners are always wary of change, he notes, many have expressed strong interest in having one place to go for everything they need to sell Ivanti, MobileIron, and Pulse Secure systems.
“They don’t want to be navigating across different partner programs and agreements, systems, and tools in order to quote, and to sell and to deliver a combined and integrated solution,” Randles says.
Building the new company-wide partner program is one of three focus areas for Randles in his new role. Introducing sales and technical enablement materials that help partners master a wider cross-section of Ivanti’s expanding product catalog is another.
“When you’re with a company like Ivanti that’s moving and growing very quickly through acquisition, there are always more and more products that we need to train and enable partners to sell,” Randles says.
A third focus in coming months, he adds, will be developing a core set of metrics for tracking how well Ivanti is serving its partners and how well those partners are performing in response.
Randles, who most recently led global business development and alliances for VMware’s cloud management SaaS business, joins Ivanti at a time of rapid change. The company came into being just over four years ago, when private equity firm Clearlake Capital united a collection of its holdings, including LANDESK, HEAT Software, AppSense, and Shavlik, into a single entity with one name (derived from “avanti,” the Italian word for forward or ahead).
Last August, it accepted additional funding from TA Associates, some of which it used to purchase MobileIron and Pulse Secure the next month. Jim Schaper, Ivanti’s chairman, became its CEO as well early in January. Some three weeks after that, the vendor announced a definitive agreement to acquire enterprise service management specialist Cherwell Software.
According to Randles, Cherwell won’t be the last company Ivanti buys. “We’re going to continue to acquire,” he says, noting that the company’s new partner program will be architected to accommodate those future purchases swiftly.
Though its wide-ranging portfolio resembles the integrated managed service product suites offered by vendors like ConnectWise, Datto, and Kaseya, most of Ivanti’s solutions are designed for use primarily by corporate IT departments rather than MSPs. The company plans to train more attention on MSPs going forward in response to mounting demand from such partners for its offerings.
“We’re seeing a growing interest on that side of the business for the SaaS-based products,” Randles says.
