OneLogin, which has been focused more on cloud identity management for SMBs, has gotten more aggressive in the enterprise with the differentiating hybrid capabilities from its introduction of OneLogic Access earlier this year.
Matt Hurley as Vice President of Global Channels, Strategic Alliances and Professional Services, OneLogin
This week, Unified Access Management company OneLogIn announced the appointment of Matt Hurley as Vice President of Global Channels, Strategic Alliances and Professional Services. Hurley spent the previous six years at Juniper Networks, most recently as VP of Global Channels. He had previously had multiple roles at Bell Canada, including SVP of Professional and Advanced Services and GM of SMB.
Hurley’s appointment is significant because the position is new, marking OneLogin’s progression in their growth where the company deemed an executive in charge of this area had become a necessity.
“This is a new role in the company,” Hurley told ChannelBuzz. “Kevin Biggs, our Chief Revenue Officer, is my boss, and he and Brad Brooks, our CEO, believe in the channel as way to expand our footprint. The company is in a large growth curve, and there is a real push to build a channel program globally to capture the exponential growth we are seeing.”
Hurley said that Unified Access Management provides the ability to take Identity management, which has traditionally been on-prem, into the cloud. Where OneLogin now differentiates itself is its ability to combine cloud management with on-prem in a true hybrid strategy.
“OneLogin has been around for eight years, and was cloud-based and benefitted from the growth of the cloud, but until we introduced OneLogin Access early this year, we didn’t have a product that connected the cloud identities and that huge on- prem base,” Hurley said. “We can bring both of these worlds together with this hybrid approach.”
A top priority is using this hybrid capability to drive OneLogin further upmarket.
“The company has been traditionally commercial and SMB-focused, and we are the market leader in the commercial SMB component of the cloud Unified Access Management business,” Hurley indicated. However, we are now moving very quickly in the enterprise and are moving up the stack. Our move upmarket has brought us high-profile enterprise customers like Mitsubishi, NASA, and Airbnb. That ability of our solution to unify those cloud-based applications with the on-prem ones gives us a differentiating factor in the market. Our competitors do this, but with them, it involves a professional services-type approach.”
Hurley said that the channel will be critical in expanding OneLogin’s presence in the enterprise.
“Between 30 and 35 per cent of our sales are indirect, and our intention is to grow that percentage while also increasing our direct sales as well,” he indicated. “We now have over 250 channel partners worldwide, including big ones like CDW and SHI, and the channel has delivered some key enterprise wins for us in the last two years. That ramp is accelerating. We have always been a channel-friendly company in terms of the way our direct sales compensation model works, as it is channel-neutral.”
While OneLogin has a global presence, the majority of the partners are in North America.
“Our EMEA presence today is mainly in the UK, France and Germany, and we are expanding into APAC now,” Hurley said. “We do have a healthy channel business in Japan, and you will see us expand aggressively in Australia and India.”
Big changes are also coming to channel policies in North America.
“In North America, our annual end user and customer event is in San Francisco on September 12,” Hurley said. “We will announce a refreshed channel program and put in enterprise components.”
An enterprise-focused channel program requires different kinds of enablement and programs, Hurley stressed.
“Commercial and SMB are easier implementations, and channel programs based around them are mainly based on compensation models. In the enterprise, the partner has a different discussion with the customer, and it’s around solution sales and not point products. So, the program not only needs a compelling compensation model, but also a couple of other pillars, which we will roll out. One is an education pillar, and the other will be a second pillar around our portal. We will launch a brand new one over the next quarter, and it will make available new tools for growth for partners, such as making campaigns with ISV bundles.
“We also expect to announce the signing of a very large distributor and a few big enterprise-grade security partners,” Hurley added. “We haven’t had distribution in North America before, but we are going to go to the two-tier distribution model. We are in discussions with the distributor now, but we haven’t inked the deal yet.
Distribution will expand the company’s partner base, but Hurley emphasized that they won’t be using distribution to sign up anyone who is interested in making a sale as a channel partner.
“We aren’t out schlepping the pavement for partners,” he said. “We are very targeted in who we want.”
Hurley said that he had spent his first twelve days on the job talking with OneLogin’s senior leadership team on individual strategies and what they considered to be pain points.
“I have also been talking with some of our larger partners on what’s working and what’s not, and I have had meetings with some of our larger ISV partners, about whether there is an opportunity to do more business,” he said. “We have a lot of ISV partners, but we need to be focusing more on our top 5 or 10 ISV partners – and that’s the next stage.”
