Cyber security player Illumio has pointed to its relationship with BT as evidence that it is building a solid ecosystem for its partners.
The firm is giving BT Security the option to add its micro-segmentation Illumio Core product to its portfolio as part of the relationship.
Scott Walker, senior director of channel and alliances for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at Illumio, said the firm’s ecosystem would be stronger as a result of the tie-up.
“This partnership is an important piece of the larger puzzle. Providing remarkable support to our partners and working together internationally to achieve shared goals is our top priority,” he said.
“The market is moving towards an ecosystem of best-of-breed technologies. Certainly, zero trust, which is a topic that we are very integral to, is an ecosystem of technologies, of solutions, which all fit or work together to solve a business outcome for a customer,” he added.
“We’re a channel-first company, building partnerships in all different kinds of shapes and sizes to fulfil the needs of customers. It will always be a thoughtful and strategic, focused approach, from our perspective,” said Walker.
Natalie Walker, senior manager of managed security services at BT Security, said it looked for partnerships, particularly on the managed services side, that made sense to the business.
“We’re a channel-first company, building partnerships in all different kinds of shapes and sizes to fulfil the needs of customers. It will always be a thoughtful and strategic, focused approach”
Scott Walker, Illumio
“The priority for us is to get a balance between working with fewer partners that cover the problems we need to solve for our customers. We need to supplement that with some players – and Illumio falls into this – that are best of breed and really fix a problem that we can’t in another way,” she said.
BT’s Walker added that there was an increasing interest from customers in managed security services and the company was expecting more growth.
“The scarcity of resources and expertise across our industry continues to drive that. We see that as our priority area of growth across our business,” she said.
She said BT Security offered the technology to its customers but, where appropriate, also looked at reselling the capability if that was the right thing to do.
Illumio’s Walker said the understanding among customers of the need for segmentation, to protect against the lateral flow of data, had increased significantly over the past couple of years, but that did not mean there was no longer an education role for partners to play.
“Customers will come to Illumio, or together with BT, and they will say, ‘We already know the host-based approach to solving this problem is the best way to achieve it, but help us understand how we do this effectively together’. That’s a very different conversation, which in my mind typically means that the market is certainly maturing,” he said.
