ThycoticCentrify Access Management Team Renamed Delinea

‘There’s benefits to creating a new brand when you merge two companies of about the same size. It embodies what we do without hindering all the other things that we could do,’ CEO Art Gilliland tells CRN.

Privileged access management (PAM) vendor ThycoticCentrify has renamed its business Delinea as the company looks to double revenue and increase its use of solution providers.

The Redwood City, Calif.-based company selected the name Delinea to highlight the company’s ability to delineate between what rights a user has and what rights a user doesn’t have, said CEO Art Gilliland. Delinea has 1,000 employees and 10,000 customers and was formed in April after TPG Capital bought Centrify and Thycotic for a reported $900 million and $1.4 billion and brought the two rivals together.

“There’s benefits to creating a new brand when you merge two companies of about the same size,” Gilliland told CRN. “It [the name Delinea] embodies what we do without hindering all the other things that we could do.”

[Related: It’s Official: Centrify-Thycotic Merger To Form Identity Superstar]

Delinea’s main competitor in the PAM market is longtime leader CyberArk, and Gilliland said the company will differentiate itself through ease of deployment and time to value. Gilliland said Delinea makes it possible for customers to get up and running quickly without the need for a large staff to manage the implementation process. CyberArk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

“You need to have powerful products, but they need to be relatively easy to use and low impact on your people,” Gilliland said. “While we may not have all of the edge case bells and whistles functionality, our product solves the problems that our customers have and is deployed way faster.”

Gilliland wants to increase the share of Delinea’s business flowing through the channel from between 75 percent and 80 percent today to more than 95 percent by investing more in lead generation, marketing and branding and adopting a comp neutral incentive plan for the company’s internal salespeople so that there’s no cost to bringing in a channel partner. The company works with some 2,800 solution providers.

Delinea relies near-exclusively on the channel to sell to the U.S. government and smaller client accounts, he said, while some larger customers – particularly in North America – prefer to buy direct. Centrify was historically focused on the Fortune 250 while Thycotic served customers below the Fortune 250 down to $200 million in annual sales, though the two companies had some overlap in the Fortune 500, he said.

“If we want to double our business over the next couple of years, we‘re going to need a lot more partner community to be able to help us do that,” Gilliland said. “Not only for the selling and the reach to the customers, but also for the delivery of services.”

Delinea expects to increase its headcount by between 35 percent and 40 percent over the next year, and Gilliland said the company has in recent quarters seen its topline revenue grow faster than that. From a metrics standpoint, Gilliland said Delinea is tracking net new customers on a quarterly basis and net recurring revenue expansion on a year-over-year basis to assess how happy existing customers are.

“We see a very strong customer demand,” Gilliland said. “We came to market with something that was easy to deploy and to use. And it‘s our belief that if the products are easy to use, you’ll actually use them.”

Thycotic’s strength historically has been ease of use since the product is fairly intuitive to operate and doesn’t require professional services to update, while Centrify historically excelled at least privilege offerings for remote access scenarios, according to Jeremy Bandley, solutions architect for Toronto-based Delinea partner Softchoice, No. 32 on the 2021 CRN Solution Provider 500.

Bandley hopes the product integration process emphasizes taking the best aspects of each company or platform, using that to augment any weaknesses in the other company’s technology and disseminating that message out to the public. Although partners may continue to use the Thycotic and Centrify names when speaking with longtime PAM customers, Bandley supports the company adopting a new name.

“It’s good to rebrand because it gives a sense that it’s something different,” Bandley said. “I like the idea of a new name because it signifies that it’s a different product.”