Security Firm Thycotic Ramps Up Professional Services Training For Partners

The provider of privileged access management solutions is also continuing to increase its investments in lead-generation activities with partners.

Thycotic is bringing a new professional services training and certification program to its top solution provider partners, as the company seeks to scale up its privileged access management solutions through the channel.

The Washington, D.C.-based company is also pursuing growth with its broader community of partners through increased investments in deal registration and lead-generation activities with partners, Thycotic executives said in an interview with CRN.

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The professional services training and certification program enables solution providers to implement and integrate Thycotic’s products on behalf of customers--allowing partners to go beyond just reselling the products, said Charlie Patsios, director of channel marketing at Thycotic. The program is targeted at the 20 partners that Thycotic is working most closely with currently.

“We’re not scaling our professional services internally--we’re going to scale it through the partners,” Patsios said. “Once they’re up and running and established, we will now steer business their way.”

The push for growth with the help of the channel comes as Thycotic had its best quarter ever in the second quarter of the year, in terms of creation of new opportunities, said Bob Gagnon, vice president of channel sales at Thycotic. Widespread remote work has boosted demand for solutions that prevent credential theft such as privileged access management (PAM). Meanwhile, last week the company was named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant ranking of PAM providers.

Currently, 60 percent of Thycotic’s revenue is generated through the channel. But the plan is to increase that percentage over time, in part through sending more business to solution providers that’ve completed the professional services program, executives said.

At Cincinnati, Ohio-based RoundTower Technologies, No. 79 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500, several engineers are going through the professional services program with Thycotic, said Dustin Grimmeissen, director of network and security practices at RoundTower.

“It improves profitability to be able to do services. You can make a certain return on reselling software, but you can up that return if you’re also the one that implements the software and integrates it,” Grimmeissen said. “For a solution like Thycotic, their product is not overly complex--so it’s less about implementing the product itself and more about how it integrates into a client’s environment.”

Ultimately, “it just shows a level of maturity that they’ve built out a formal certification program--not just with video trainings, but with actual labs and working environments,” Grimmeissen said.

For Thycotic’s channel program overall, the budget is up about 30 percent this year, which has led to increased investment both in top partners and in the company’s larger base of solution providers, Gagnon said.

That has included providing funding for lead-generation events with partners, which have pivoted to virtual events during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“We’ve been investing heavily in the lead gen side with the partners, doing events mutually with them,” he said. “That’s been really successful.”

And while enabling top partners to do professional services is “critical,” Thycotic recognizes that “it’s not the main lever that we look at for our growth,” Gagnon said. Incentivizing the broader community of partners to generate more leads and register more deals remains the biggest driver of growth, “and that’s really where we’ll continue to invest,” he said, adding that Thycotic’s authorized partners receive 30-percent margins.

Thycotic provides its privileged access and password management via both cloud and on-premise deployments. Products include Secret Server, which establishes a secure vault, identifies privileges for all accounts and enables management of secrets--such as through provisioning and rotating credentials. In June, the company acquired Onion ID to add three PAM products to its offerings, including Thycotic Remote Access Controller.