Thales encouraging wider portfolio sales

Thales has announced the introduction of a fresh partner programme, with offerings covering its channel base and gained through the acquisition of Imperva.

The firm will be running aligned programmes after going though the individual offerings, introducing a “best of both” approach.

The plan is to unify into a single programme next year, but the aligned offerings is available now, with the ribbon being cut on Thales and Imperva Accelerate Partner Networks.

Thales picked up Imperva in December 2023, bringing its global partner base up to around 6,700. Since then, the focus has been on developing a programme that would being consistent benefits, support and tiering, with the aim of making it easier for those looking to sell across the vendor’s portfolio.

John Polly, vice-president of global channel and alliances at Thales, has been leading those efforts to introduce an enhanced partner programme. “We took the best out of both programmes, along with some new things, and brought them together so they’re mirrored,” he said.

“This means we have a consistent, harmonised discount structure. So no matter what product it is, partners get the same discount across the board, and the same training and requirements.”

The approach has also been to ensure partners get the best situation as a result of the fresh programme. “Maybe you were a gold level partner with Thales, but you were only silver within Imperva,” said Polly. “If you are a partner that sold both, we actually level up the partner to the highest level.”

He added that the vendor made further moves to make life easier for the channel, including looking afresh at the training support available. “We revamped the training. to simplify it. All of our pre-sales training is no charge now, which wasn’t the case before. That was an inhibitor for our partners to want to get deeper with us. So, we just took that off the table.”

The other area where Polly and his team have made investments is around the demand generation and co-op selling. “We had a co-op programme on the Thales side, but we didn’t have it on Imperva. This is tens of millions of dollars investment into demand gen funds available for our partners that want to go deeper with us,” he said.

With the mirrored enhanced programmes in place, Thales has made it easier for partners to sell across the portfolio, and Polly is expecting an increased amount of cross-selling as a result.

“Thales is focused on three areas in security. We’ve got an identity portfolio, a data portfolio and an application security portfolio. Identity and part of the data came from legacy Thales, while Imperva brought in application security and data as well,” he said.

“Our portfolio is pretty broad and we have cloud-based, SaaS-based offerings. We have on-prem offerings and [so on], and there’s different profit scenarios on the portfolio. We’re really trying to give the partner the path to go down on how they want to work with us. The harmonised discounts, the simplified training, taking the cost off the pre-sales training and the investment in demand gen is all about that.”

Polly said that there are opportunities for partners to take more products into existing accounts: “There’s not a high percentage of customers that bought Thales that also bought Imperva. We want to make it easy because end users are looking to lean towards security partners that have a platform, which we are doing, and they’re trying to reduce the amount of vendors.”

Polly added that the programme would reward existing partners, and the door remained open to those looking to start working with the vendor. He pointed out the opportunity, particularly around data, remained a strong one for channel partners that could help to solve customer challenges.

“That control and visibility across their data [is important], especially as there’s more regulations coming out every day in every country about the management, control and sovereignty of their data,” he added. “We are very bullish on that piece.”