US privilege identity management vendor Lieberman Software has revealed its plans for drafting channel partners after officially launching in the region 10 months ago.
The LA-based firm was established in 1978, but only decided to expand its operations into EMEA last year.
Roy Duckles, the firm’s EMEA channel director, was recruited in October 2013 with the remit of building the vendor’s partner programme from scratch. “They see the market as one they’ve neglected in the past and they need to address that,” he tells Channel Pro.
However, the exec explains “it’s been a good pipeline of business in 10 months...We’ve made quite big inroads.”
Lieberman launched its Advanced Partner Programme launched in February 2014, and with the help of distributor Exclusive Networks, has now signed up 36 resellers across EMEA, including four in UK.
“We’re not trying to have 20 partners in the UK; I’d sooner have four or five partners that didn’t compete with each other,” says Duckles. “We try to profile our partners so we don’t have similar target markets or customer bases.”
Lieberman’s UK partners – ZeroDayLab, Lan3, InfoSec and Bull Information Systems – all specialise in different verticals or markets, he explains – although Bull’s acquisition by Atos has meant the firm now “may review that relationship”.
“We have a revenue target and a growth goal we’re trying to achieve and we need to make sure we approach the right partners. If they’re a Softcat or a company that’s carrying thousands of vendor products, we don’t want to be another vendor on the list. There’s nothing worse than trying to get them to sell our products when it’s not important to their business.”
Nevertheless, the vendor is also looking to make inroads with large SIs, as in currently in talks with SCC and Fujitsu, which has a new cyber security team.
Lieberman is going up against much more established competitors in the region like CyberArk, as well as giants CA, IBM, Oracle and Quest.
However, Duckles says being a smaller, completely channel-driven vendor has its benefits, including being “more flexible, and more focused.... and they know we’re not going to compete with them.”
He also maintains the firm won’t compete on professional services: “Some of our competitors – 50 percent of their business is professional services. We’re a software company, not a delivery company.”
Duckles maintains the privilege identity management is becoming more relevant, and that there is a growing awareness among customers that they need to adopt the technology to help control the access to sensitive data within their organisations.
Despite this, he is also aware that the firm still has a mountain to climb when it comes to market awareness in the region. “We’re lacking brand awareness; that’s where we need the channel to help,” he says.
“We have grown a good pipeline with the partners we’ve got but there’s a bigger market than we’ve got coverage at the moment. We need to have at least double the workforce across the region.”
