In 2021, Netwrix acquired four companies, including Stealthbits, which was approximately the same size as themselves. Since then, they have used three different portals, with products from two of the acquired companies not available through any of them. Now everything is available through a single portal, along with new training and tracking capabilities.
Melissa Schmulson, Vice President of North America Channel at Netwrix
Cybersecurity vendor Netwrix has followed up the 2021 acquisition of four closely adjacent companies with the launch of a new partner portal in which the nine acquired and rebranded products are all available, along with the two original Netwrix ones, along with registration and training benefits which were not available for many of the products before.
Netwrix made a significant expansion in 2021 with four acquisitions, the first of which was technically a merger with Stealthbits.
“We kicked off the new year on January 1 2021 with the announcement that Netwrix and Stealthbits were now one company,” said Melissa Schmulson, Vice President of North America Channel at Netwrix, who herself arrived as part of the Stealthbits merger. “Stealthbits and Netwrix were similar in company size, but because Stealthbits was more of an enterprise player, and Netwrix more midmarket, their sales were about the same, with one of them leading one quarter and the other leading in another, even though Netwrix might sell 800 accounts in quarter and Stealthbits 80. This is because of the difference in the dollar value between enterprise and midmarket accounts.”
The other acquisitions were Anixis, which makes password management technology, NNT [New Net Technologies] which facilitates change, configuration, vulnerability and asset management solutions, and PolicyPak, which secures and manages on-premises and remote Windows desktops and laptops.
“All the acquired companies fit the broad scheme of identity infrastructure, which they addressed in their own way, and each company retained its own identity,” Schmulson said. This year we all added Netwrix to the products’ name.” Thus, Netwrix Change Tracker is the old NNT Change Tracker, Netwrix PolicyPak is the new name for PolicyPak, Anixis Password Policy Enforcer has become Netwrix Password Policy Enforcer and Anixis Password Reset is now Netwrix Password Reset. Five Stealthbits products have also been rebranded. Netwrix SbPAM was formerly Stealthbits Privileged Activity Manager. Netwrix StealthAUDIT was StealthAUDIT before. Netwrix StealthDEFEND is the new name for StealthDEFEND. Netwrix StealthINTERCEPT replaces StealthINTERCEPT, and Netwrix StealthRECOVER was formerly StealthRECOVER.
Now Netwrix is adding these acquired and rebranded products from the acquired companies – nine in all – to a newly announced partner portal, where they join the two core Netwrix products, Netwrix Auditor and Netwrix Data Classification.
“Previously, Netwrix, Stealthbits and NNT had their own portals, while the others had none,” Schmulson said. “The unification started when the mergers happened. Now we have one unified portal, and have phased the other ones out.”
The new portal has additional advantages as well.
“Partners can now register for one product or multiple products at the same time, which was not possible before,” Schmulson said. “The Netwrix portal now also uses Salesforce to allow partners to track their deals which again, was not the case before.”
Through a three-step onboarding program, partners simply enroll in the Netwrix Channel environment, fill their pipeline using joint marketing activities and sales tools, and register deals on the Partner Portal. Partners can register deals for all 11 products using the same portal. They also have access to 161 sales and marketing tools from all the products, including sales cheat sheets and battlecards, marketing videos, and marketing campaigns-in-a-box.
Consolidated training and certification programs are now available for everything through the portal.
“Before, this kind of sales, presales engineering and professional services certifications were only available for Stealthbits and Netwrix,” Schmulson said. “Now we have appropriate training for everyone available through the portal.”
Netwrix is also emphasizing factors beyond the portal integration to encourage partners to cross-sell and upsell offerings sourced from different legacy companies.
“We know that having several products on the line card can be a challenge for partners,” Schmulson stated “So we re-architectured our Go-to-Market messaging so it wasn’t about products. We looked for gaps between layers, and then broke it own for specific use cases. For example, now Netwrix focuses on ransomware. Stealthbits has SbPAM, a PAM [Privilege Account Management] solution that is easier to deploy and manage, and a good fit with the Netwrix easy to deploy style, so we emphasize it there.”
The emphasis on use cases rather than brands also helps Netwrix get into certain partner accounts which would not have been receptive in the past.
“Some partners have close relationships with some of our competitors, and this lets us go in through a different angle if they have a closer relationship with a competitor,” Schmulson noted.
Netwrix kept the channels from the acquired companies intact, integrating more than 300 channel partners in 2021, although they did do some tinkering with the program management. Schmulson said that they continue to be aggressive in looking for good partners.
“There were a lot of overlaps because of the similarities of technology,” she indicated. “What we did do was retier the partner program. We didn’t revoke anyone’s ability to transact, but we retiered it so top partners had more benefits, and those that didn’t do much business with us got more limited margins.
“We are always looking for the best partners to work with, and we will work the people who want to work with us,” Schmulson added. “We spend most of our time growing relations with our existing partner base.”
