Ivanti offers white glove service to encourage cross-selling

Ivanti has outlined plans to roll out a “white glove” service to support partners that want to sell more of its security portfolio.

The vendor used its first face-to-face partner event since the pandemic began to share the plans and encourage its top-tier partners to get involved with them.

Alan Finden, EMEA channels director at the Ivanti Security Group, said the firm had made acquisitions and alliances that meant it had partners selling different technologies who could benefit from a more integrated solution.

The Security Solutions Group – formerly Pulse Secure – will encourage partners to sell the technologies it has acquired through picking up MobileIron, Cherwell and, recently, RiskSense.

“Ultimately, the acquisitions have been about putting together a platform for customers to discover what’s on the network, to manage what is in their environment, to secure what’s in their environment and then also, when necessary, to service, acting as a service helpdesk and IT service management helpdesk as well,” said Finden.

“We absolutely want to work with partners to push that portfolio into their customers. When you’re buying up companies, you’ve got differences in channel strategy and differences in partner landscape.”

He added that across Western Europe, Ivanti had about 1,500 resellers, but not many were selling three or more products from the vendor’s portfolio.

“There really is quite a disparate channel landscape,” he said. “So in July of this year we launched a partner programme which took the best of all three companies, and was very focused to working with partners and very focused with developing business with them.”

Finden said the company recognised that it needed to give partners a helping hand to get to grips with the portfolio and take the different tools on offer, and that had led to its decision to increase support.

“White glove is a kind of concierge service – where there is a real personalised approach to doing it,” he said. “We’re focusing in particular on the top tiers or partners of the three programmes, working with them and where the wider portfolio is of interest. We are making sure they are hand-held across onto one of the other partner programmes and, during that process, they will maintain the highest tier.

“We are protecting their investment, protecting their value that they have with the brands they have worked with the most. With that tiering comes things like deal registration discounts incumbency protection and also enablement programmes, so we’ll make sure that as they move across, that there’s a bespoke enablement process so that they and their engineers can get to know the whole portfolio in a wider sense.”

Finden said the security market was growing and the experiences of the pandemic had showed how important it was to continue to secure remote workers and there would be plenty of targets for resellers that sold across the portfolio.

“There is a huge opportunity for partners who have been busy selling remote access, last year and this year,” he said. “They should be looking at network access control, they should be looking at patch management, endpoint management, and so on. So, yes, the opportunity to cross-sell is vast.”