The existing strong technical integration between the companies has been extended to make the joint solution much more turnkey for partners. More enablement and sales tools are being provided, along with new incentives for selling the joint solutions, and new joint integrations for partners are also coming.
Networking visibility vendor Gigamon, which has been steadily building out a complementary security side of their business, and cybersecurity vendor FireEye, which offers a highly complementary solution set to Gigamon, have announced a strategic partnership. It extends the companies’ existing technology integration to the turnkey level, and greatly strengthens the joint go-to-market initiatives. For their joint channel partners, it’s extremely significant news that should make the products an easier sell to customers.
The two companies had an existing relationship, which has now been deepened.
Phil Griston, Gigamon’s Senior Director, Partner Marketing and Development
“Gigamon has been seeing more and more business coming from enabling security, and we have had a technical integration with FireEye for many years,” said Phil Griston, Gigamon’s Senior Director, Partner Marketing and Development, who runs their alliances and channel marketing. “They are a very strong complementary fit, which provides a strong analytics capability for us. In our premium reseller accounts, there is an 80 per cent overlap with FireEye, although it is a smaller percentage for the whole of our 400 certified partners. Hundreds of our customers have implemented joint solutions with our original technical integration, and this expanded relationship is a natural evolution of that.”
Gigamon has a broad strategic partner ecosystem, with between 80 to 100 technology partners, but has a very small number of more strategic partners, like in the expanded relationship with FireEye. The partnering strategy is similar from the FireEye side.
“We have many technology integration partners, but fewer than ten of these are close ones,” said Rich Stegina, vice president of strategic partnerships at FireEye. “My team is global, and we measure success by combined partner sales, and we map accounts with these partners globally.”
The expanded relationship deepens go-to-market activities around the GigaSECURE Security Delivery Platform and FireEye Network Security.
“We haven’t had the kind of turnkey wrap that we are introducing now before,” Griston said. “We have relied on the channel to put the solutions together. What we do now is provide more enablement and sales tools, such as joint sales guides, deployment guides, and enablement training. We are also adding more incentives for selling the joint solutions. In addition, we will be bringing out new joint integrations that channel partners can bring to market.”
Rich Stegina, vice president of strategic partnerships at FireEye
“Until this expansion of our relationship, this was just a product integration,” Stegina said. “We weren’t really tracking down to account levels on a quarterly basis, and weren’t doing that channel enablement of both of our solutions combined. Now we are. Before channel partners had our two point solutions, and had to figure out how they were best sewn together. We’ve now done that for them.”
Stegina indicated that the two companies’ mutual partners will also be mapping out joint strategies, just as the vendors are.
“When I get down to the district level, its very complementary, and the partners who aren’t doing this tend to be very regional partners,” he said. “You will see most of the major ones mapping closely.”
While there is a strong overlap between the sweet spots of Gigamon and FireEye, Gigamon does have somewhat more presence in the commercial space of the market, while FireEye is more at the high end. Stegina thinks that the expanded relationship may expand FireEye’s total addressable market as a result.
“Our marketing positioning seems very similar to Gigamon’s, and there is a pretty good overlap, but they might bring us more into the commercial market in some places,” he said. “Time will tell on that in terms of marketing these relationships in the field.”
Ryan Morris, Managing Partner at Annapolis MD-based network monitoring and security-focused solutions provider BAI [Blackwood Associates International] said the Gigamon-FireEye combination has been a natural one for them.
Ryan Morris, Managing Partner at BAI
“We are only focused on large enterprises, and I can’t think of an account that doesn’t have one or both of them in it,” he said. “We sell a lot of leading products, but we are heavily invested in this Gigamon-FireEye relationship because both products in the same account result in a very different outcome. By adding these two technologies together in accounts, we have a much more elastic and resilient platform. The left hand doesn’t always talk to the right hand on security. The gaps that this causes is solved when we combine these two solutions.”
Morris believes that the expanded relationship will help BAI out on several fronts.
“Both are premium products, with a premium price tag, but before, the scope for deployment has been very small. They have been used at the gateway, not in the cloud or in the data centre. We think that we can now increase their exposure across the entire environment – from soup to nuts.”
Going forward, the expanded relationship will make things easier for BAI.
“It’s now much more turnkey,” he said. “Before, we were doing a lot of educational work ourselves, and customers were very dependent on us to hold their hand. Now FireEye and Gigamon have have taken a lot of this on themselves. They highly document their testing and make sure customers can see their optimal demand. Their doing a lot of the legwork here helps us a lot.”
