1. David, it’s great to have you with us at BeyondTrust. Alliances are such a key part of our go-to -market (GTM) strategy, and it’s been great working with you during your time at SailPoint. Before we move on to your new role with us, tell us a little bit about your time at SailPoint.
Well, first off, I am so excited to be here at BeyondTrust!
I was with SailPoint for just about four years, and headed up SailPoint’s overall Partner Marketing, which included an incredible global partner marketing team where we focused on driving strategic partner go-to-market (GTM) activities, joint solutions, and integrated offerings. Our work encompassed hundreds of integrations, 70+ SailPoint Technology Alliance Partners, as well as driving GTM initiatives across global system integrators (SIs) and a vast channel/reseller community.
In my role at SailPoint, I worked closely with our top strategic technology alliances, such as AWS, Microsoft, ServiceNow, and, of course, BeyondTrust. It was an incredible time and experience, helping to drive the technology alliance program from its very early days to a highly successful and mature program.
While I am thrilled to be at BeyondTrust, I had an amazing and fulfilling tenure at SailPoint, which was my second family for the past 4 years. There are so many great people there that I will miss working with every day. My SailPoint family was all so wonderful and supportive of this new opportunity. But the great thing is that I get to stay in the extended SailPoint family, continuing to work together on joint activities and future integrations. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
2. What inspired you to join BeyondTrust, and what transferrable learnings and experience from your SailPoint tenure are you most eager to leverage in your time here?
There were so many reasons I was excited to join BeyondTrust, but I would say it was mostly around the huge growth opportunity I saw for the company, the overall privileged access management (PAM) market, and for myself professionally. I was also so impressed with the company executive leadership. I've enjoyed the opportunity to know and work with some BeyondTrust leaders while at previous companies.
Clearly, coming from SailPoint, I understand the importance of identity, especially securing privileged accounts and identities. Privileged identities are the “keys to the kingdom” and need to be robustly protected.
Whenever I would be presenting on the value of SailPoint and BeyondTrust combined solutions, and the importance of protecting privileged identities, I would always use the famous quote by Willie Sutton. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton simply replied, “Because that's where the money is.” Gaining control over privileged identities enables an attacker to fast-track access to a victim’s most sensitive data and assets.
In terms of learnings from SailPoint, but also from my overall 20+ years of marketing and alliance experience, I’m a huge advocate of partnering and working cross-functionally. That’s why I love working with partners. It’s truly about making the model of 1+1 = 3, and bringing the value of these partnerships to life for our mutual customers.
3. How do you see our technology alliances and integrations playing an even more vital role for the future when it comes to implementing more holistic and seamless security strategies?
If you distil it down, ultimately, it’s all about meeting our customers’ needs. As organizations are digitally transforming and moving to the cloud, they are looking for best-in-class solutions that integrate and complement each other. They don’t have the time or IT resources to force fit these solutions.
Another concern is that siloed solutions that don’t interoperate well with other technologies can create security gaps—both in protecting and responding to threats. Interoperability is no longer a nice-to-have capability, rather it’s a must-have! It’s all about creating a cohesive, fully integrated ecosystem across an organization’s security, identity, IT, and OT infrastructure.
I had the opportunity to sit in on our Customer Advisory Board meeting the other day and the importance of integrations came up time and time again. One customer discussed the value that they were getting from the end-to- end integration across BeyondTrust, SailPoint, and ServiceNow. That’s exactly the kind of solution offering that we want to see. These customer needs are what we are looking to address here at BeyondTrust and that’s why I am so excited to be part of this team.
4. Tell us a little bit about your thoughts for the future of the rapidly growing privileged access management (PAM) market, and how you see BeyondTrust maintaining and strengthening our position as a market and innovation leader.
We have certainly seen a perfect storm over these past two years. The high-velocity of changes—such as increased remote working and digital transformation—largely to adapt to social distancing initiatives, vastly expanded the threat surface. And attackers have shown no mercy. I think this new IT landscape will persist for some time. This is why a least privilege access model will continue be so important and a strategic/board-level discussion for our customers. Increasingly, PAM controls are also being required by cyber liability insurance providers for customers to acquire, or renew, coverage.
However, today’s heightened risk landscape requires many best-in-class technologies working in synergy. And, while some vendors tout “zero trust solutions”, enabling a zero trust architecture requires many different components, of which PAM is a foundational part. This is why I always talk about how it takes a village to truly enable a zero trust security posture. Delivering on this approach is critical to our customers, and having this integrated, complimentary ecosystem of technologies is key to continuing to be a PAM leader.
5. You’ve been here for just a few weeks now, and while it is still early days, what areas of BeyondTrust’s strategic alliances are you keen to enhance and focus on as your first priorities?
First off, I have to say that I am so impressed with how successful the current technology alliance team has been. I kind of think of myself as a coach coming in to take a currently successful and winning team, and to help move the program to the next level.
Now, I don’t claim to be as philosophical as Ted Lasso, but one of my favorite quotes from him is "Taking on a challenge is a lot like riding a horse, isn't it? If you're comfortable while you're doing it, you're probably doing it wrong." I’m not sure how accurate that is with regard to horse riding, but that’s what we will look to do – continue to challenge ourselves and look to evolve and innovate our current alliance programs and offerings.
I guess I would say it this way, there isn’t anything that I’m not looking at. How can we improve our processes, integrations, tools and ways to help to tell our technology alliance story externally, internally, and throughout our ecosystem of partners?
6. Thinking higher-level for a moment, what’s your big vision for our alliances in 2022 and beyond?
The long-term vision is to solidify BeyondTrust as a premier “partner and program of choice” for our technology partners. That includes building out world-class products, integration tools, programs, and, of course, team! It will really be about going deep with our top strategic alliances, broadening our overall technology alliance program and processes, and looking to be where our customers want to purchase our solutions by leveraging new routes to market, such as external Marketplaces. We will also be looking at driving co-innovation and new complimentary solutions via a new development extensibility platform.
7. What key changes are you planning on implementing that will improve our integration offering?
One of the big strategies and a key part of our integration roadmap is around a centralized platform that spans all our products and embraces a broad, integrated, security fabric approach. This allows for a broader “hub” focused model rather than the individual “spokes”.
A true centralized platform and SDK approach makes it much easier for our technology alliances to extend and innovate across all our solutions. This also lines us up nicely to move to a BeyondTrust specific Marketplace, enabling our customers and partners to gain access to partner-specific integrations, as well as a self-service approach to developing new interoperability.
8. How do you plan on cultivating existing partnerships to maximize their potential, as well as forming new ones to further diversify our offerings?
As mentioned, I’m a big advocate for the 1+ 1 = 3 approach. I know that term is used often, but I have seen this approach really work and address our customers’ needs. It’s ultimately about maximizing these partnerships to provide solutions to address customer security needs. I call these “trifecta solution offerings”. This can mean integrated solutions such as the example I gave earlier with BeyondTrust, SailPoint, and ServiceNow. A trifecta offering can also entail working through our GSI partners with a focus on a specific industry, such as utility/OT, for example. There are so many exciting opportunities here for us to explore and leverage.
So, my goal is not just to drive our technology alliance program offerings, but also to identify and uncover new and promising opportunities for co-innovation and use cases with our global integration partners.
9. Lastly, if you could give our alliances a takeaway message about your expectations and plans for mutual success going forward, what would it be?
We are investing, we are innovating, and we are integrating more. Much more. Our customers need products that can plug and play, easily, with no fuss. 2022 will be a transformational year for Alliances at BeyondTrust. Together with our partners, we want to create solutions that compliment each other, and work together seamlessly. We are building out an Alliance program, hiring more staff, building joint GTM plans to help us collaboratively offer more value for our customers.
Learn more about BeyondTrust’s Technology Alliances.
Jodie Sutton, Senior Director, Channel Marketing
Jodie is the Global Senior Director of Channel Marketing at BeyondTrust and has over 20 years’ experience in technology marketing. During this time, she has made significant impacts on businesses, increasing their marketing efficiency and organizational agility. Jodie's specialties include developing strategies that improve alignment, automation, and acceleration within the channel. She works closely with our ecosystem of partners, such as Alliances, Global Systems Integrators, and Resellers. Delivering impressive ROI is at the forefront of everything she does. Her marketing experience spans across the full division, with vast experience in branding, budget management, and field marketing - while also passionately working in the Channel. In her personal life she is a huge fan of formula one, and cars in general. She’s a proud Mum to a young boy and a beautiful dog and spends as much of her time with her family as she can. Her motto in life is “Live your life today, not tomorrow".
