Pulse Secure believes that the less familiar Software Defined Perimeter architecture market has reached a critical point in market acceptance.
The new channel program is much deeper and more fully built out than the original one designed when the company spun out of Juniper, as Pulse Secure wants its program to enable more committed and better trained partners – as well as reduced numbers of them.
Pulse Secure has had free ‘try before you buy’ products before, but this new Community Edition has all the features of the full version, and with no time limit on use. The only limitations are that its scalability is limited to smaller applications, and it lacks the full management and Pulse Secure support.
Pulse Secure’s NAC solution has addressed the IoT market before, but for the first time they have added functionality specifically designed for Industrial IoT environments.
Pulse Secure is seeing strong momentum in its virtual ADC business this year, with the growth of cloud applications, and is looking to both cloud-focused partners and their traditional partners broadening out their business to continue the trend.
New features in Pulse Policy Secure include the improvement of Pulse Profiler, the addition of MacOS device support and improved vulnerability assessment capabilities, but from a channel point of view, the most important thing like is likely the deepening of integrations with the major firewall vendors.
Pulse Secure’s flagship access joins their vADC in the Azure cloud, broadening their hybrid cloud strategy which already had a fuller AWS presence.
Features likely to be of significant interest to the partner community include new Android on-demand capability, as well as deployment capability on AWS as well as Azure.
The expansion of the PSA appliances beyond their original form factor will open up new opportunities for Pulse Secure partners, particularly around LAN security regarding contractors and partners, which has become a subject of major concern, and where cloud and virtual models offer more flexibility for some use cases.
The deal goes beyond the technology integration and makes Pulse Secure and Fortinet strategic partners. The go-to-market element will see the two companies proactively identify a cadre of strong mutual partners, and use them to drive the solution to market.
The new analytics capability is the first stage of a Pulse Secure project which by next year, is intended to provide systematic linkages to orchestration and automation.
The Juniper spinoff launches its first partner program, to which old Juniper partners have to apply, and says that it has some unique differentiating factors.
The Juniper spinoff previously had separate box-by-box management for the broad range of capabilities it offered, and being able to do everything now through one pane of glass becomes a competitive advantage.
