Britive has established a partner program designed to enable a select number of partners to build a major business with their technology.
Art Poghosyan, Britive’s CEO
Los Angeles area-based startup Britive has announced that its inaugural partner program is now live, with the highlight being that large national solution provider Optiv is one of their charter partners.
Britive, a 2018 startup, makes a Dynamic Permissioning Platform that provides cloud-native privilege access management across multiple clouds.
“Our cofounders have been working in this space for 20 years, including consulting for IAM [Identity Access Management],” said Art Poghosyan, Britive’s CEO and one of its co-founders. “The security world and Privilege Access Management [PAM] before the cloud was very different, and we saw a huge gap in meeting the needs of customers, especially in the enterprise. So we started Britive to address the cloud-native world for PAM.”
The goal here is to deliver not just full cross-cloud native functionality, but enabling unique service offerings, including 13 IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and DaaS services, to take advantage of that.
“Native functionality is available from the major cloud providers – but from the enterprise standpoint, the complexity within each one is hard by itself, and when you expand across cloud, it’s hard to solve with a joint solution, across competing clouds,” Poghosyan said. “We understood cloud technologies and API integrations deeply, and we saw how security products of the past decade were designed and built around security use cases. Now, they are strongly impacted by ‘shift left’ and Zero Trust, so we have baked those into our technology.”
Britive’s Dynamic Permissioning Platform lets partners solve immediate customer problems like the need to automatically grant Just-In-Time permissions, auto-expire permissions, enforce least privilege access, and right-size broad permissions. It enables partners to quickly catalogue accounts, permissions, and groups, while associating risk to those objects, to work towards a Zero Trust risk posture.
Poghosyan stressed that Britive’s technology isn’t just for large enterprises.
“It’s much broader than the Fortune 500,” he said. “The big driver is a multi-cloud footprint, so this encompasses cloud native orgs and ones with no physical footprint whatsoever, companies like Snowflake. Privilege Account Management has never been SMB when it comes to server admins, but when it effects business users like HR and finance, it has broader implications and use cases.”
The channel is a critical part of the Go-to-Market strategy.
“We are addressing a massive problem, so the issue is how to bring it to market at scale,” Poghosyan said. “We have been in the channel business itself before, and sold our company [Advancive] to Optiv, the first acquisition they made after they merged. We understand the force multiplication gained from leveraging the channel.”
It’s not a pure channel strategy, however.
“At this early stage, a hybrid strategy makes more sense for business, but even in this stage we are building direct,” Poghosyan said. “We are investing in the channel across different types of partnerships – resellers, integrators, technology alliances and marketplaces. Our goal in the next 1-2 years is to pick a smaller set of partners and enable them and make them successful.”
At the program’s launch the partner ecosystem consists of five technology partners, six major SIs and resellers, and four cloud marketplaces.
“Our past connections with Optiv certainly helped land them, but they also see the demand for cloud native solutions and turned to us for their next set of needs and requirements, in order to stay head of the curve in technology,” Poghosyan said.
“For channel players, especially service-oriented businesses, Britive is unique as a young company.” Poghosyan continued. “Because we have been on that side of the market, we understand why it’s important to be very channel-friendly and offer a chance to build a big business with Britive. One of our features is being able to discover across clouds right away, which means a very quick time to value. Because we touch a lot of other tech environments, that’s a great opportunity for systems implementation and design work as well.”
Poghosyan said that the subscription– based pricing model is designed to reward partners.
“We are aware that it is important to have very generous incentives for partners, especially at this stage,” he indicated. “Training and enablement are also critical, and we have a small dedicated customer-facing partner team to train partners and enable them to become evangelists.”
Poghosyan also noted that Britive is well suited to managed service offerings.
“Our SaaS technology makes it easier for an MSP partner,” he said. “They don’t have to own any of that infrastructure themselves.”
