Ivanti has completed several major acquisitions during the last year, which means customers looking for guidance about the direction their assets will be heading.
Chris Goettl, Senior Director of Product Management at Ivanti
Today, Ivanti, which has built up a large conglomeration of assets through mergers and acquisitions to present strong product portfolios in IT service management, unified endpoint management, and security, is kicking off their Ivanti Solutions Summit virtual event today. While the event will review things customers want to know like the road maps for their recent acquisitions, the overall theme of the event is the ability of the Ivanti portfolio to help customers adjust to the new Work from Everywhere reality.
Chris Goettl, Senior Director of Product Management at Ivanti, said that all these areas have been doing well.
“We have grown the security business so much that we broke it into endpoint security and network security,” he indicated. “My group covers endpoint hygiene, like patch management, and user protection, like anti-phishing. Network security is VPN, Network Access Control and emerging Zero Trust. The other brands are endpoint management from MobileIron and LANdesk, and the service management group, which we now call experience management, which comes from Ivanti and Cherwell.”
Goettl emphasized that the event will focus not just on the technologies, but on the specific differentiation that Ivanti brings to them.
“With Zero Trust for example, it’s not just the technology but the strategy,” he said. “There, my group has a supporting role, and the other security group builds it. Most of the vendors on the market doing Zero Trust are focused on access request, and rely on other vendors for hygiene. Ivanti can provide a lot of that foundation as well as the core Zero Trust strategy. We will also provide updates on ways we are responding to vulnerabilities quicker, and strong discovery capabilities from the endpoint management side.”
Ivanti Neurons will also get much attention at the event. Introduced in July 2020, Neurons is a hyper-automation platform that uses automation bots to proactively, predictably and autonomously self-heal and self-secure devices, and self-service end users.
“Ivanti Neurons is a key piece in how things will come together, and in how each of the specific technologies will come together to strengthen that overall,” Goettl said. “The evolution of Neurons is what people are looking forward to hearing about this time.”
The impending Zero Trust launch in July will also be talked about heavily, Goettl indicated.
Some interesting road map previews will also take place within Goettl’s own endpoint security area.
“In patch management we are still hybrid, but we will be showcasing a fully cloud solution for the latter half of this year,” he said.
“There are other pockets of changes customers definitely want to hear more about,” Goettl added. “In UEM, MobileIron was strong on the mobile side, and Ivanti was strong on the client side. The phase one integration, which was originally based on a partnership, was at the tail end of last year. That original phase one integration gave the ability to manage client and mobile devices side by side. Part of the purpose of this event is expanding that knowledge to the broader audience, to spread the news of our strategy and how we packaged and integrated these capabilities to better enable customers.”
Some of things for the next phase of the integration here will be announced at the event as well, Goettl noted.
“On the service management side, we have the same kinds of questions coming up,” he said. “Both Cherwell and Ivanti customers want to know how the product road map will impact them. We will have first phase discussions at this event. We think we are at good phase of vision plus the first phase of product strategy, to provide a fairly seamless and clear pass for customers. That pattern is feeling much more established after so many large acquisitions.”
Finally, Goettl emphasized that Ivanti CEO Jim Schafer, who spoke with ChannelBuzz early this year about the plans for the Cherwell integration, would be making a clear statement of Ivanti’s philosophy and direction moving forward.
“He has a very strong vision for where he sees us going,” Goettl said.
