Venafi looks to channel to grow Enterprise Key and certificate management

Specialist in key and certificate management Venafi is on a channel recruitment drive aimed at F5, Citrix [Netscaler] and some Cisco partners for its automated system for provisioning, discovery and monitoring of encryption keys and certificates.
The firm, which has spent the last eight years developing relationships with the world’s Certificate Authorities (CA), as well as the technology to integrate with devices that uses certificates, has only signed up 50 customers but as Jeff Hudson, CEO explains, “Our customers are the global 2000 and these are really big deals.” Hudson estimates that the average deal size is around $500,000 and delivers recurring revenue to the partners for a very long period.
Says Hudson: “We were at the RSA show and in our suite we have a multinational, multi-billion dollar security company and we have one of our customers, a much larger, multi-billion dollar multinational, and the customer says, if you [the security company] don’t support these guys [Venafi] we are not spending $30m dollars with you – that is how serious large organisation perceive the problem to be.”
Hudson claims that they have no rivals in the space and that other vendors like Entrust or Symantec will only work with their own certificates and in a smaller subset of scenarios. He also claims that Venafi is still the only vendor to cover all the CAs, as well as SSH keys which are used for server to server file transfer which need to be updated on a regular basis.
Venafi is targeting the top tier partners of application deliver controller vendors such as F5, Citrix and Cisco. Hudson expects the channel to double from the five active UK partners at present and highlights financial services and large retail as good targets. The firm originally started with a 90 percent direct touch model in Europe but that has now moved to 50/50 and Hudson acknowledges that the sales team is more focused on supporting channel partners to close.