THINK FAST. What’s an IT service that’s easy to deliver, needed by almost every business on earth, and too often overlooked by channel pros?
Give up? Sectigo has an answer: managing the digital certificates that millions of websites, devices, and applications rely on to authenticate themselves. Though data from Research and Markets predicts the certificate authority (CA) market will grow at a 12.3% CAGR through 2026 to $226 million worldwide, certificate lifecycle management (CLM) is a revenue opportunity too few IT providers take advantage of at present, according to Jennifer Binet (pictured), Sectigo’s senior vice president of enterprise sales.
“I think it’s underutilized across the board,” she says. Channel pros who do handle CLM for their clients, moreover, tend to store information about the certificates they oversee in awkward, easily misplaced spreadsheets, resulting all too often in missed renewal dates and downtime.
Sectigo can help with all of that. In addition to being one of the world’s top CAs, with more than 35 million active certificates currently in circulation, the company makes a cloud-based CLM solution named Sectigo Certificate Manager (SCM) that delivers automated certificate procurement, installation, and renewal functionality through a consolidated, multitenant interface. Since late last year, furthermore, the system has supported public and private certificates from any issuer too.
“It’s a nice clean management console that allows you to take all actions on all certificates and discover all certificates across the board, regardless of whether they’re our certificates or another vendor’s certificates,” Binet says, noting that Microsoft is among the popular third-party certificate authorities the system now supports.
“You’ll see quite a few others that will be released throughout the course of 2022,” she adds.
Other recent SCM enhancements include functionality for using certificates rather than passwords to authenticate users in zero-touch security schemes and a robotic process automation tool designed to help bots connect and communicate securely.
Expanding into Adjacent Markets
Additional solutions in Sectigo’s growing portfolio aim to help CLM partners expand beyond SSL services into rich adjacent markets. The company introduced a secure key storage system for Internet of Things devices last summer, for example, and offers a web security platform equipped with vulnerability scanning, patch management, anti-virus, firewall, and backup capabilities, among others, some of which Sectigo acquired along with web security vendor SiteLock a year ago.
A centralized management console allows users to deploy and administer those features through a single pane of glass, and the system’s modular architecture lets them bundle services in customized combinations. Automated sales, upsell, and renewal functionality seeks to make profiting from the solution simpler, and users can co-brand it with Sectigo or employ white-label branding instead.
Secure Partner Program
Sectigo’s recently revamped Secure Partner Program, meanwhile, provides a range of benefits to users and resellers of all those products. The new offering includes registered, silver, gold, and platinum levels that members can qualify for by clearing sales thresholds and completing training courses. The higher your tier, the better the margins you get on Sectigo products.
Members also receive access to a new portal that includes a sales and marketing resource center and an automated tool for requesting and tracking MDF, as well as the Sectigo University education site and channel-only webinars and events.
Though Sectigo’s over 1,200 partners already account for more than 30% of her revenue, Binet is counting on the revised partner program to boost both figures. “We’ve been working pretty diligently on expanding our channel presence,” she says. If that effort leads more channel pros to recognize how much money they’re leaving on the table by ignoring CLM, those efforts will have paid off for everyone.
