Illumio launches its first strategic partner program ever with 33 partners, and a process to expand the number of integrations by helping partners do more of the development work, and then have the solutions validated by Illumio.

Illumio, a cybersecurity company that is focused around Zero Trust Segmentation, is announcing a new strategic partner program, the Illumio Technology Alliance Partner Program ([TAP]. The new program’s goal is to stimulate deeper strategic integrations with partners, and to increase their number by having these strategic partners take the lead in their design, and then have them validated by Illumio.

While Illumio has always emphasized the importance of strategic integrations, somewhat surprisingly, they have not had a program like TAP in place before.

“We have had tech alliances for years now, but what we are announcing now is a program structure and strategy to bring interoperable solutions to our customers,” said Eric Renner,  VP, Technology Alliances at Illumio. “As the company has matured, this is part of our growth and development. The new program really signals our need to commit to meaningful integrations to reduce risk for our customers.”

It is also structured different than the previous and more informal collaborations.

“In the past, we have worked on a very targeted basis with our tech partners, which has been tightly interconnected with our sales strategy,” Renner said. “We are now looking to solve more particular custom use cases, and are providing a greater degree of support and enablement around that.”

This also involves having the partners do more of the work, whereas Illumio did much of it themselves previously.

“In the past we had largely done the development of these solutions on our side,” Renner indicated. “As we go forward, we will provide a capability for TAP partners to manage this on their side as well. Once we have identified that there is a viable partnership, we formalize the partnership through TAP, and provide access to he Illumio techs as well as our APIs, our support portal and our documentation. Our APIs are very rich and we are looking to constantly expose them to our partners. Once the resulting integration is complete, we will validate it, and then together promote that solution.”

The idea with the validation is to make them rigorous without making requiring a herculean effort to achieve.

“We are talking about security solutions that are business critical, so the  downside of failure could be catastrophic,” Renner noted. “As a result, we want to make sure that they are well designed, and that the APIs are implemented correctly. We will develop in each case an appropriate testing plan that goes through a high level of testing, so partners can promote these solutions with the same high degree of confidence that they can help their customers reach their Zero Trust goals.”

The program launches with 33 strategic partners, including IBM Security, Tenable and HashiCorp. The program has also validated a further nine solutions from companies who are not formally part of the program.

“It’s really about quality, not quantity,” Renner said. “We will continue to expand our partners but will do so on a very selective basis, where the business integration delivers value.”

Renner said that the new Illumio TAP will help customers by providing more and better Zero Trust segmentation solutions with full  APIs, documentation, and support.

“The explosion in the volume and scale of ransomware attacks show its important not to just protect the perimeter today,” he emphasized. “You have to assume breach, and assure cyberresilience. That begins with creating better access and connectivity across the system. This program underscores our commitment to this.”