Interviews

Channel businesses will be crucial for business growth

Channel business are mutually beneficial and rewarding avenues for businesses looking to grow in new markets. For Tenable, partnerships with vendors and channel partners has helped the company grow its customer base in India and across the globe. Kartik Shahani, Country Manager, Tenable India discusses the company’s channel business, how it is improving their sales in India and its plans for the future.

 

1 – What is your channel partner strategy for India in 2023?

Partnerships between vendors and channel partners are mutually beneficial, which enhances brand awareness and extends the market footprint while growing the customer base. As a channel-first company, our channel partners are an extension of our business in India and the rest of APAC. This has enabled us to decrease time to market, provide access to new competitive markets, establish a direct sales channel and also tap into training resources.

Tenable has always been committed to a channel-driven business model in the entire Asia Pacific region including India. This includes providing partners with regular business planning sessions, enablement, training certifications and dedicated marketing support that helps generate leads for their sales teams.

In terms of technology, Tenable has a robust MSSP offering specifically designed to provide customers with the flexibility of choosing solutions and customized services to help them to manage, measure and reduce their cyber exposure. Tenable introduced deal protection on subscription renewals, when many vendors in the market are taking the direct route.

Through our partners, we want to focus on exposure management, to help organizations gain a holistic view of their attack surface and manage vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, identities, cloud, web apps, attack pathways and external attack surface management in a unified space. Exposure management focuses on eliminating data silos and harnessing the power of data to see what an attacker sees, prioritize and eliminate risks accordingly. Exposure management aims at reducing overall cyber exposure and establishing a proactive approach to cybersecurity.

 

2 – How do you help the partners to use online technologies to improve their sales in India?

Our recently launched exposure management platform called Tenable One offers customers a contextual view of all assets and associated software vulnerabilities, configuration vulnerabilities and entitlement vulnerabilities, whether on-premises or in the cloud, to help them understand where they are most exposed to risk. This allows channel partners to be more strategic with customers in answering the question ‘how secure are we’. Taking a platform-first approach with Tenable One,  essentially opens up a whole new revenue opportunity for our partners. This means that our partners can spend more time mapping our value proposition against customers’ needs instead of taking a point solution approach which is already a crowded space.

 

3 – Do you have any training programmes to upskill your partners?

We invest in providing our partners with the necessary training, certification, and collaboration to enable them to deliver our industry-leading exposure management to customers. Tenable Assure partner program places managed security service providers (MSSPs) and resellers to act as expert advisers, those help organizations, predict, prioritize and reduce cyber exposure by translating raw security intelligence into an actionable, risk-based, metrics-driven program.

Our certification program comes with a wide range of sales and technical training content. These are delivered in easy-to-understand videos. This program enables our partners to design and deploy risk-based exposure management solutions across the entire attack surface.

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