Onapsis’ channel strategy has large integrators front and centre, but the company is actively involved in facilitating and creating relationships across the four partner pillars.
Darren Gaeta, Onapsis’ Vice President of Worldwide Alliances and Channels
Boston-based Onapsis, which provides protection for business-critical SAP and Oracle applications, has formally launched its Onapsis nCase Partner Program. This new program provides core table stakes like deal registration that had not previously been provided by Onapsis’ formerly rudimentary channel support. It is also made much more systematic by a four pillars strategy that not only supports four different types of channel partners, but actively seeks to facilitate collaboration between them.
“As a platform, Onapsis enables organizations to protect SAP and Oracle,” said Darren Gaeta, Onapsis’ Vice President of Worldwide Alliances and Channels. “We detect on a real time basis any type of vulnerability and any compliance flaw. We go very deep into the code, to prevent any confidential information from being stolen.” Their customer base is primarily larger enterprises, Global 2000 types, with Walmart, Shell and Pfizer being among their referenceable customers. They do sell slightly downstream from that however, through MSSP partners.
Gaeta’s track record involves channel management stints at companies like HP ArcSight and Securonix which sold much of their business direct, and where the ‘channel’ role was mainly alliances partners like large integrators and independent software vendors. That has impacted his strategy at Onapsis, which is built around a four pillar strategy – strategic system integrators, MSSPs, technology alliance partners and VARs. While many companies provide for supporting these four groups in their partner programs, the differentiation here is that this one is explicitly focused on collaborative efforts between the groups, and Onapsis.
“In my previous roles, the ‘channel’ Go-to-Market was more on the alliances side, with partners like the big integrators, rather than VARs,” Gaeta said. “As I built out these alliances program, I came up with this four pillar strategy.”
The large integrators are really the key pillar in this approach, with the other partner types playing roles which are important, but which are also more complementary.
“These alliance partners are the ones who create strategy and direction at the C-level, and the recommendations from them provide a footprint for the strategy of these enterprises,” Gaeta said. “That’s much more the case than VAR partners with this kind of customer.” He indicated that the integrators typically build practices around Onapsis.
The four pillar strategy is focused on collaborating between these partner type around the Onapsis platform, to facilitate Onapsis entering and expanding into these plum enterprise accounts. For example, with Walmart, Walmart’s reseller is Optiva, one of Onapsis’ VAR partners. Deloitte, an Onapsis SI partner, implemented WalMart’s platform. Walmart also works with ISVs like Splunk, ServiceNow, and Palo Alto Networks, who are also Onapsis partners.
“Most vendors are focused on the VAR channel, but we get into accounts like Walmart with the relationships that we have built across the four pillars,” Gaetta stressed.
“We are also working on developing platforms with Splunk and with ServiceNow, each of which involves other Onapsis partners,” he added. “They will remove the brick wall which exists between SOCs and ERP platforms. As we drive solutions through systems integrators, since they like to bundle solutions that they can take to their customers, it behooved us to put together joint solutions they can take to market.”
This approach was basically created out of whole cloth by Gaeta after he joined Onapsis in December 2018.
“There wasn’t a real program before,” he said. “There was no deal registration at all, nothing to provide the partner bringing in the new logo with protection. We had a few partners, but I leveraged my past relationships to bring in new ones like Optiv and Guidepoint. Now, we have taken steps to really add more value to the four pillars, including technical and certification training. We also enhanced our partner portal to make it easy to grab use case documents, white papers, and vertical market strategies.”
In addition to deal registration, Onapsis has also added a dedicated channel marketing team with webinars, and co-marketing.
The focus in certifications is on the system integrators.
“SIs have to have at least four certified engineers on our platform on their staff,” he said. “We will continue to be very stringent on certifications for SIs, including getting them retained every six months on our platform. Our VAR channel partners have not been interested in the services drag.”
The total ecosystem of all partner types is about 100 partners globally. They are strongest in North America, although they hope that EMEA and APAC will see an upsurge in partner business growth this year.
“We are being very nimble, and focusing on the SIs,” Gaetta said. “We are not a 100% channel model, but our model does give partners the opportunity to make good revenue, because of the uniqueness of our four pillars strategy.”
