Tehama just came to market in the last year, and sees their differentiated solution as a logical one for service providers. They will be at MSP Expo in Fort Lauderdale next week to demonstrate it.
Gene Villeneuve, Senior Vice President of the Tehama Business Unit
Tehama, a newly-established business unit of global IT product and services company Pythian, has entered into a significant new partnership with thin client and enterprise management software maker IGEL and Vancouver-based PCoIP provider Teradici. The solution gives organizations access to scalable workspaces in much less time than alternative approaches. It is currently available on the AWS platform.
Pythian created Tehama last year to productize a solution that they developed internally to solve a problem.
“Pythian is a 22 year-old services company which provides database and cloud services for organizations ranging from small to midsized,” said Gene Villeneuve, Senior Vice President of the Tehama Business Unit. “They grew their business over time, and to scale that globally they hired across the globe, with people in 150 cities. In order to give these people access to mission-critical systems in a secure fashion, they had to find a way to do that, and for that, they built the precursor to Tehama. By 2016, customers were asking if they could use it for other service providers, so we created a new business unit to commercialize it. The original platform was designed explicitly for Pythian, so it required repurposing the platform with a broader architecture.”
What Tehama does is both secure and simplify onboarding of an IT services provider by organizations.
“Say a Big Five bank wanted to hire a global systems integrator for a project, and bring 50 of their people on,” Villeneuve said. “Before, they would have needed to make them use the bank’s laptops or make them come on site. We virtualized that whole process, so the customer can determine who gets to come in to do the work on mission-critical applications. We have over 200 different organizations on the platform today, all over the world.”
While the kind of workspace-as-a-service capability that Tehama provides is not uncommon, the security-related services they provide around it are not commonly part of such solutions.
“The additional capabilities include a secure perimeter around multiple desktops, the ability to collaborate around them, to log and audit everything, and to share credentials,” Villeneuve said. “We compete against companies coming from many spaces – security companies like Zscaler, privilege account management companies like BeyondTrust [formerly Bomgar], access management tool vendors, VDI vendors and DaaS vendors. But no one does what we do out of the box, and that makes us unique. We deal with what had been a common issue where onboarding vendors for projects could take many months. We can onboard and scale in hours instead of weeks or months.”
Tehama’s customers include both buyers and sellers of services, and tend to be from the midmarket and enterprise. Villeneuve said there is a logical channel play, which the newish business unit has just begun to build out.
“Service providers love this,” Villeneuve said. “Ongres, which is PostgreSQL-focused and based in Spain, is the largest one. They mainly work on financial systems. We also have some other partners with reseller agreements in front of them right now. However, we are about to expand here. We spent 2018 hardening the product to scale. Next week, we will be at the MSP Expo in Ft, Lauderdale, in our first real entrée into the service provider word. In February, we will also be at the Canadian Cyber Threat Exchange in Toronto on February 26, to expose the platform to larger organizations.”
Tehama is built on AWS, and Villeneuve said that AWS has opened a number of doors for them. The IGEL partnership was developed by Craig Irwin, Tehama’s recently appointed Vice President of Strategic Accounts and Global Alliances.
“We looked at some larger thin client vendors, and tried to set up some meetings which didn’t happen,” Villeneuve said. “We got a meeting with IGEL at AWS back in November, and did a a protype in December. This all came together very quickly. They also saw in us an opportunity to deepen their relationships with Teradici and AWS. This will eventually open up our ecosystem to IGEL’s ecosystem of resellers, which has 400 partners in both North America and Europe. It’s a win-win-win for everyone.”
Right now, the IGEL relationship is a strategic alliance, but Villeneuve said it will make sense to extend that to reselling. In the short term, Tehama and their much smaller number of partners will be selling it.
“Jeremy Cochrane, our Vice President of Global Sales, is building out a sales engine,” Villeneuve said. “We see this solution as creating net-new resellers for us.”
For now, the solution is just AWS, although in the longer term, that will likely change.
“AWS has been a phenomenal partner,” Villeneuve said. “Generally, being AWS-only has not been a barrier for us, although one large bank was very specific that they only used Azure. We do know though, that as the clouds and our customers grow, we will need to look at adding Azure and Google Cloud Platform as well.”
