Thurber, whose most recent stop was at Riverbed, will look to increase channel sales though both partner program and Go-to-Market changes.
Delinea, which makes a cloud-native Identity Security Platform that secures human and machine identities, has announced the appointment of Alex Thurber as Senior Vice President of Global Channels. Thurber will report to Chris Kelly, President of Delinea, and will be tasked specifically with scaling channel growth. This will involve simplifying the channel as well as growing its business.
Thurber has done similar roles at many companies in the past. Most recently, he came from Riverbed Technology, where he had significant success with go-to-market strategies driving significant success and transformation. Additionally, he has led worldwide channel sales at Cisco and McAfee and held senior leadership roles at Pulse Secure, WatchGuard, and BlackBerry.
Thurber, who just completed his 12th day at Delinea, is excited about where the company is and what he intends to do for them.
“I came over because I love this space,” he told ChannelBuzz.”Thirty years ago, I founded a company that was Checkpoint’s first reseller. Delinea has strong people who are dedicated to their mission, which was really important to me. It feels like a startup even though it isn’t. We are a a customer first organization with a channel-first delivery model. I own all the partner relationships and report to Chris Kelly.” The relationship between the two men goes back to Cisco days.
“We provide PAM [privilege access management], giving the fewest number of people possible the ability to do their jobs with the least amount of access,” Thurber said. “We have built a system to deliver improved security by providing the least amount of access possible to do your job effectively. The real importance is that as we move into AI and machine identities, the importance of identity based threats grows and this provides them with the necessary protection.”
For instance, Delinea has recently accelerated their machine learning and AI offerings by providing critical guardrails for organizations, enabling them to secure the use of AI and ensure security with AI without sacrificing compliance or productivity.
They have also invested significantly in building out the channel over the last year.
“The exciting part of this is working with ‘frenemies,’ Thurber said. “There are a number of different technology claims now in the market, but we have a really strong technology base which we have redone it into a cloud native platform. It offers four-and-a-half 9s (99.995%) of uptime per year, providing access to a platform with no downtime.”
Delinea makes the only platform that enables you to discover all identities – including workforce, IT administrator, developers, and machines – assign appropriate access levels, detect irregularities, and respond to threats in real-time. It facilitates deployment in weeks rather than months, and says that this requires 90% fewer resources to manage than the nearest competitor.
Thurber said that while Delinea has already made significant steps, more needs to be done here.
“While there is already strong strategic functionality – some room for improvement remains, especially in North America,” he said. “We are going to continue to adjust.”
The key here is working through a more limited channel of high quality partners going forward.
Today they have about 1500 partners in the Americas with the being to focus on a significantly smaller number.
“We want to build tight relationships and support our most important partners,” Thurber said. “Scale is key and this is the best way to focus on delivering enablement in order to be successful.”
Changes to the channel program will be an important part of this.
“The program as it stands now is complicated,” Thurber said. “We will clean that up and make it easier to do business. “My immediate plan is to simplify the partner program, which has been a traditional multi-level program in the past.
While the cloud-first strategy in the North America to go to market is strong,Thurber intends to expand that to other geos as well.
“Being cloud-first and expanding those capabilities is important,” he said “Today we are fully hyperscaler transactable in the U.S. and UK. Bringing in the power of hyperscaler completely through the channel is a major objective going forward.”
