The Whole is Bigger Than the Sum of its Parts. The Channel Experience

Build Partner Trust. Avoid Partner Fatigue

“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” The road to becoming a trusted partner to your customers has no shortcuts. As you review your portfolio, filled with various network and IT security solutions you’ve accumulated over the years, you believe each fulfills the needs of your customers. Each solution represents significant investments in resources and efforts to stay competitive and succeed. You’ve worked hard to grow and earn the trust of your customers, even when there seemed to be no other choice. But, given the opportunity, wouldn’t you prefer to provide your customers with a superior experience? One that you would enjoy as well?

Recently, we’ve heard many vendors talk about platform consolidation and customer fatigue. The correlation is clear. But what about the fatigue experienced by Channel Partners? Consolidating acquired products under the same umbrella can present its own set of challenges. Achieving optimal efficiency nirvana starts with selecting a vendor that simplifies integration and support.

Close your eyes. How do you imagine nirvana?

Single vendor SASE is channel-first in its DNA. Every channel aims to become a trusted partner by offering the most advanced, authentic, one-stop-shop solution for its customers. The challenge some partners face is building a future-proof business that allows them to shine and differentiate themselves. To succeed, partners should base their strategy on a recurring revenue business model, that enables them to build and deliver managed or value-added services with a customer success approach, while choosing a vendor with a platform that eliminates the grunt work. That is the way to capitalize on a market that, according to the Gartner® Market Guide for Single-Vendor SASE, says, “by 2025, 80% of enterprises will have adopted a strategy to unify web, cloud services, and private application access using a SASE/SSE architecture, up from 20% in 2021”.

Imagine sitting in front of your customers, asking them what network and IT security nirvana means to them. You will probably hear:

• “We need all network and IT security capabilities delivered anywhere”
• “I need to be able to scale fast”
• “My IT team is exhausted handling patches and updates and ensuring they are implemented across the company”
• “I need to be able to manage it all seamlessly by a single console”
• “All decisions made should be based on a single data lake”
• “Simple, secure, resilient”
• “It must be cloud-native; I don’t want to manage appliances anymore”

As a trusted partner, you have four options:

1. You might come back and say “No one can do all that”. No one wants that.
2. Go to the nearest DIY shop, buy duct tape, think of a narrative that will fit your offering of multi-SASE vendor solutions, and come back to your next meeting with what would be yet another ‘doing the same thing expecting a different result’ kind of solution.
3. Choose a wannabe single-vendor SASE. (See number 2 above). Now imagine that they are all owned by a single company. Well, at least someone else bought the duct tape and did all the taping for you. It still doesn’t change the customer experience.
4. Achieve nirvana with a single-vendor SASE platform.

Is this really your comfort zone?

­A SASE offer constructed from multiple vendors or patched-together solutions is anything but comfortable. It requires building and maintaining expertise across various vendors, managing complex sales cycles, staying updated on new features, endless patching, and managing the shipping and storage of point products that aren’t cloud-native. As your business expands, so does the burden of managing multiple vendor solutions, necessitating the support of numerous teams across sales, engineering, support, and operations. It’s more of a burden than a comfort.

Grow with your customers, but not by adding more vendors or solutions

Most of the partner programs out there today have all the standard industry ingredients: free self-paced enablement, $0 demo equipment, straightforward deal protection, good margins, access to marketing content, and a frictionless MDF program.

But these offerings won’t move the needle for you to drive significant impact. The needle will move if the value proposition of a platform allows partners to focus on what really matters.

Introducing the concept of a single-vendor SASE platform has inherent advantages for the channel:

• Growth by mastering the customer experience. One business unit: sell cycle, knowledge, retention, support, and services.
• Simplicity at its best. Demoing and POCing a cloud-native solution to upmarket customers with the most complex customer environments doesn’t take months to design, plan, and execute. Efficient architecture for low-maintenance operation.
• Differentiate yourself. Invest in your high-margin professional and managed services; spread them across your customer base.
• Customer First.  Inequivalent customer satisfaction and low churn.  
• Agility. Fast response to customers’ needs. New sites are deployed in minutes, and M&As are executed in days or weeks. Upsell and cross-sell features are available at the flip of a switch.
• Efficiency. Unified management gives you full visibility and control over the entire solution from a single interface, significantly reducing human errors and oversights.
• Recurring revenue model. Minimized operational costs = high-profit margins.
• Eliminate grunt work. Maintenance, patches, updates – everything is taken care of seamlessly and automatically.

Then you can Veni, Vidi, Vici the $25B (so far) SASE market.

With a platform architected from the ground up, Cato SASE Cloud is channel-first in its DNA. Whether you are an MSP, SP, VAR, or GSI, you can offer your customers’ nirvana, while experiencing it yourself.

For the whole to be bigger than the sum of its parts, look at the parts carefully; they need to be assembled perfectly without cutting any corners. Look at the roadmap; any enhancements and added products should fit as if they were designed to grow the whole.

Dare to be different and move away from your comfort zone.