Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
How do I implement my go-to-market strategy with my Cloud Partners? How do I get buy-in from my executives, sales team, and others in my organization? How can I get the right attention from the Cloud Providers?
Questions like these, and many more, arise when you’re trying to build relationships with the Cloud Providers and accelerate your revenue journey through the cloud. Welcome to ‘Unlock Cloud Go-to-Market,’ the series where hosts Erin Figer and Patrick Riley share the essential stages of the Cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize, and grow your company’s revenue through the cloud. They’ve helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion, and in each episode, they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put them into place. Because ultimately, this way of thinking is the future. And the future is now.
Brennan Lynch [00:00:00]:
If you look at, you know, your growth trajectory and your lack of internal competition, also you start looking at, as an isv, your competitors. You know which of your competitors can transact in marketplaces and which can't. You know, if you can and you don't have any encumbrance, then you're more likely to win a deal when you come up against a competitor who doesn't have a good marketplace practice and doesn't really have a good understanding of how to leverage their channel community with it. Right. And bring their channel community along.
Speaker B [00:00:33]:
Welcome to Unlock Cloud Go to Market, the series where hosts Aaron Figar and Patrick Riley share the essential stages of the cloud GTM maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue through the cloud. They've helped countless ISVs tackle the ins and outs of their Cloud GTM motion. And in each episode they're sharing those success stories from the people who have put, put them into place. Because ultimately this way of thinking is the future and the future is now.
Patrick Riley [00:01:05]:
Hey everybody, and welcome to another episode of Unlock Cloud Go to Market season two with Tackle. I'm joined today by two very awesome guests. We're so lucky. We've got Brendan Lynch, Global Director of Cloud Marketplaces from Cyberark with us. I've also got co founder of Tackle, Brian Denker. So we're ready to have a party and hopefully you're, you're going to tag along here with us. So without further ado, welcome both of you. Thanks for, for joining us today.
Brennan Lynch [00:01:34]:
Thanks for having me.
Brian Denker [00:01:35]:
Super excited. Yep, kicking off the new year strong.
Patrick Riley [00:01:39]:
That's right. We're, we're headed into what's looking and shaping up to be a very exciting 2025 in the marketplaces. There's been a ton of momentum in, in the channel, especially with partners looking at aws, Microsoft and Google now all making advances on how they're looking at partnerships, partner organizations or resellers as we know them. And so today we're going to talk about the importance of these partnerships, the advantage they have in marketplace, the pros and cons, how to work with them as ISVs. And Brandon's going to talk to us about his experience in that realm and obviously we'll have the expertise here from, from, from Denker giving us some great context as what he's seeing evolving in the marketplace. So without further ado, Brennan, let's kick off. You know, last season we talked about Cyberark. You all have been a leader in, in leveraging Marketplace super effectively, but that, that path Kind of morphed for you all.
Patrick Riley [00:02:37]:
You started as a very heavy channel first company. I still are, but had to figure out how to work Marketplace into that process. Can you talk to us a little bit about, like, what was that legacy and that history for you launching into Marketplaces as a partner first company to today, where now the marketplaces have caught up a bit in terms of what's possible to do with your resellers.
Brennan Lynch [00:02:59]:
Great sort of lead in sort of setting the stage. Right. So my career has been working with the indirect route to market community for 25 years now, being, you know, either indirect route to market developer or an enterprise seller. And strangely, my first job in the industry was actually working for a reseller as a sales rep. So I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for, for the indirect routes to market, you know, initially, I think when cloud marketplaces started to become more prevalent several years ago, right, the channel partner community, you know, they have some scars from previous relationships that made them a little trepidatious about engaging with the cloud marketplaces. Right. They, they remember the, the ceiling or the floor that HP sort of imposed on them a decade ago. Right.
Brennan Lynch [00:03:48]:
And they, they've dealt with the manufacturer's relationships with them, you know, if it's Cisco or whoever. And so I think they have a little emotion about that and it's been working through that, helping them understand, hey, this is not something that's going to compete against you. It's actually going to give you more services sell if you structure your business properly and it's going to lower your overall weighted average cost of capital, essentially your float, if you leverage it properly. And it's been a little bit of a journey and I think a lot of the partner community is starting to develop and go there. I mean, I just look at AWS's CPPO list and how much it's grown. Just in the time I've been at CyberArk, the four years, it's been crazy, right? It's in the thousands now. And when I started, it was not. That's really been kind of the unique journey and being really transparent with the partner community, I think is very important.
Patrick Riley [00:04:42]:
So Danker and I were talking yesterday and we were having a very fun chat about different companies, especially our early customers like you all, and how you've gone through this journey. Danker, I'm curious, do you want to talk about what you saw when Cyberark came on board? What features were available with Marketplace then and how that's significantly changed to today?
Brian Denker [00:05:04]:
Yeah, for sure, it's cool. I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Cyberark. We have almost 500 customers and CyberArk was like number five. They were super early, actually. We onboarded them into the marketplace and started to help them a little bit before Brennan got there. But one of the challenges is they just didn't know how to navigate the channel business. They're almost 100% channel and so bringing on Cyberark was super exciting, but we didn't really know how to do it. And so when Brennan came on board a number of years ago, it was pretty cool.
Brian Denker [00:05:36]:
He kind of helped pioneer how we worked with the partners, how we developed our CPPO route and how this, this whole thing came to market. It was, it's really cool. So to see them go from, you know, zero and getting out there and being like a first mover to market in Marketplace, but then now becoming a leader in CPPO and moving that stuff through Marketplace has been super cool. So I, I just love the, the story of how we've been able to build that. And it, it's not easy. There was a lot of early stuff to figure out. CyberX Global, they did a lot of stuff. I remember fighting through first couple deals in Asia and fighting through some deals in, in Latin America.
Brian Denker [00:06:10]:
Just it's not super easy. Right. And so if you can figure that stuff out, you can surely scale it when you come into North America and EMEA and stuff. So it's been a really awesome journey with the cyber art crew pushing and growing and now into tens of millions of dollars of revenue every year, which is pretty cool.
Brennan Lynch [00:06:26]:
Yeah. And you know, the CPPO business, I prefer, it's more revenue rich. I'd rather do a CPPO deal than a non CPPO deal.
Brian Denker [00:06:34]:
Most people think of it negatively. It's hard. Oh, I got to, you know, I have more processing, more paperwork things. But you know, when you think of a standard partner, you know, a lot of times you're going to pay a partner even more. And the way CPPO works, it actually works out to your advantage. Right. Like you said, it can lower the actual fee. And now that, you know, Tackle's built it into their platform and AWS has built it pretty highly into their system, it's just become easier and more simplistic driven.
Brian Denker [00:07:00]:
It actually is a pretty easy way to do business. Right?
Brennan Lynch [00:07:03]:
Yeah, absolutely. And then I also have another advocate in the account to expressed our value in our technology to make sure it gets deployed properly. Right. You know, I have the AWS sellers in there helping the Customer understand why this is good from a SaaS infrastructure or a cloud infrastructure perspective. Right. You know, my particular brand, Cyber, you know, secures the environment or whoever, you know, this could go for anybody's brand. Right. But then you have the, the reseller partner or you know, the GSI or the consultant, you know, whoever's model they fit into, they're in there to talk about, you know, how this will configure with the rest of the clients, you know, tools and technology that they probably helped sell them or wanted to sell them and then configuring that.
Brennan Lynch [00:07:48]:
And if you have a good partner who actually can do the deployment and configuration of your, your product and take that top line revenue, great. You know, we see CPPO deals, they're more revenue rich. What I mean is they're generally larger than non CPPO deals. So we try and encourage that because, you know, at the end of the day, Patrick has heard me say this before. This is his finance story. This is about where the money is and going and getting that money. Right? That's, that's the job. If the partners are the ones can help us go get that money, let's go get that money together.
Patrick Riley [00:08:24]:
Yeah, Brandon, that's a good, good point you bring up. So there's a lot of financial and operational benefits for partners with Marketplace. It's, it seems to simplify some of those complexities from an operations perspective. How do you see the marketplaces today helping with things like accounts receivable or cash flow for your partners?
Brennan Lynch [00:08:46]:
You know, it's an interesting narrative, right? And I, I've been all over the planet and I speak with partners wherever I go and oftentimes they're like, yeah, we're a CPPO partner. I said, well, tell me about your practice. And that's where they kind of, the story stops for them because they don't have a practice. They've signed up, they maybe took down one deal because someone made them take down a deal and they didn't really understand what they're signing up for, right. Or they just, they signed up because they, they want to be a part of this whole SaaS story, but they haven't really figured out how the value, you know, is contrived. And that's where I start to talk to them about we're setting up their own internal infrastructure, right. Looking at this and saying, well, when you transact through Marketplace, you have full autonomy, whatever margin you want on it, but then the client has their contract with the cloud service provider and the cloud service provider is responsible for the collections. So you just take your margin as either your revenue or your profit, depending on how you interpret generally accepted accounting principles.
Brennan Lynch [00:09:51]:
And that's another story. And I don't give guidance on that because I'm not an accountant. I wrote a paper on it, but I don't give guidance on it. But it's how you interpret it. It's how you interpret it based upon whether or not you're a publicly traded company or not a publicly traded company. That right there is, is a key determining factor on how you determine whether or not you recognize margin as profit or revenue. However, what's great about that is you're no longer responsible to float the terms to the customer. If they have 60, 90, 120 day terms, whatever 30 day terms, you're no longer responsible for that.
Brennan Lynch [00:10:27]:
You're no longer taking a purchase order from the customer and then having to recreate a new purchase order and send it to the manufacturer. Right. You no longer have to deal with all of that operational overhead, but also the weighted average cost of capital of extending terms to the customer as you sort of float between the customer and the manufacturer. So from a partner perspective, if I was a reseller, I would look at this and say, this is a great financial benefit. I get all the profit, I get all the margin that I generally would get and I get less of the headache. And at some companies, I don't even have to be set up as an approved vendor on the vendor list for procurement because the contract is between the cloud service provider and the customer, not being between me, the reseller or the GSI and the customer or the manufacturer and the customer. Right. Your value is prescribed and it's still intact.
Brennan Lynch [00:11:28]:
But your risk and your operational overhead are greatly reduced. I won't say go to zero, but they are greatly reduced. And for many of these companies are smaller businesses. Right. That's material.
Patrick Riley [00:11:42]:
Yeah. There's definitely the operational benefits, the cost saving perspectives. We're now talking about three major marketplaces that have this benefit, but there's dozens of other marketplaces as well. And these three are just starting to really get resellers adopting their model because they've now made it more friendly to do that business. So. Yeah, totally agree. Hey Brian, from your work with partners, I know Tackle's been spending a lot of time with resellers. We're trying to figure out how do we support more of our partner community.
Patrick Riley [00:12:14]:
We're doing a lot of cool stuff, some top secret things as well. But from a financial and operational efficiency, what do you see marketplaces driving consistently delivering for partners. What do you see that look like today?
Brian Denker [00:12:27]:
The initial challenge was that I think partners looked at Marketplace as a competitive system and they said, hey, we both can't fit in this system together. Right. And, and then what I really think has happened by, you know, over the last year or two, marketplaces have become very mainstream. Right. And we've seen, you know, even though clouds are growing 20 to 30% year over year, you know, we show that the Marketplace is growing 100% plus year over year. So there's a lot happening in that space. But how is it growing and expanding? It's growing because they're getting more and more partners in here. So partners are leaning in and realizing there is a place for me, there is a place for me to do business here.
Brian Denker [00:13:03]:
I can do it and I can do it easily. And like Brennan said, you can do it in a risk free way as well. Right. You, you have a higher probability of getting paid. They have less responsibility. They don't have to take down the total amount and then pay the ISV on the back end. AWS or, you know, any of the CSPs will actually pay the incremental margin and wholesale price to the two parties directly. And that makes things a lot easier too.
Brian Denker [00:13:27]:
Right. So I think where, where we really see partners growing and the partners side expanding is just the next level of growth. Right. It's as companies learn how to do a direct manner through Marketplace and they learn how to do this, they realize how do I expand what I'm already doing. And if, if they're looking to expand Marketplace, they have a couple ways to go. They're going to expand either, you know, geographically and if they're going to expand geographically, how are they going to do that? They're going to expand a lot of times through partners. Right. And so they have to have partners to do this.
Brian Denker [00:14:01]:
So the CSPs have done a pretty good job of helping automate the system. Working with Tackle, we're working with them to do that, but at the end of the day, you know, they've made it easier. And so the way these companies are continuing to grow into tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue through Marketplace is by extending the partner network. Right. We're really seeing that happen.
Patrick Riley [00:14:20]:
Yeah. And the numbers are supporting it too. I know in our State of the Cloud report as well as Canalis, everybody's forecasting that, you know, over half of business through the marketplace is going to flow through the channel partner. So like this is going to be the new normal. And right now you're starting to see that significantly go up and to the right. So, Brendan, you know, Cyberark has definitely built a strong partner ecosystem over time, not just with Marketplace, right. But as a business, that's really been a bread and butter for you all from procurement standpoint and supporting your customers. But what are the key ingredients you've seen lately, especially in the last few years with Marketplace to fostering successful collaborations with your partners?
Brennan Lynch [00:15:05]:
When I sit down with a partner, I, I look at the conversation and I think, well, you know, we're going to break it up into sort of 15 minute segments, right? Any segment's going to be first one is going to be version one, the second segment is going to be version two of partnership and third segment is going to be version three. Right. That, that life cycle journey. And I start small to help them, you know, grasp the overall concept. And initially, most partners need to start out with establishing their infrastructure with the class service provider, making sure that their quoting team knows how to add margin to a private offer authorization, that the accounts receivable knows how to receive in their margin when AWS pays them or Azure or GCP pays them in their margin. Right. And sort of basic blocking and tackling, right. And then helping their sellers understand how to engage with the cloud service provider selling organization as well.
Brennan Lynch [00:16:01]:
And that's really version two is all right. How do you make sure that your sellers and those are working together in accounts? How do you help them understand how to do save propensity to buy less or leverage tackles tooling if they have a tackle listing to determine a client's, you know, propensity to buy of any one of the three, you know, cloud service providers and then target access or accessing the classrooms provider selling team, right. And then the third version three, right. When they really want to blow their minds and get crazy is they create their own listings for their own services, right? And if you look at, say someone like Accenture, their services listings have gone from, I want to say eight a year ago to somewhere around 52 now. Right. It's absolutely crazy. And it's third party services that they're doing. So Accenture actually has a Cyberark services listing on their own AWS marketplace.
Brennan Lynch [00:16:58]:
Right. I see smart resellers, smart consultants, smart GSI's starting to create more and more of their own bespoke list marketplace listings on their own specific services that they do either in and themselves or that are part of a broader ecosystem of tools and technology that they're they're sort of creating a bespoke sort of results based offering for the customer or there's specific deployment and configuration listings for specific technologies. Hey, I have this listing for Cyberark to deploy and configure it and then they can be able to build that into private offers. Right. I see the future of partner community transacting many of their services as private offers and the smart ones lean into that. Right. And that's in a very interesting way where they can start deriving more of their top line revenue right. Through their services business.
Brennan Lynch [00:17:57]:
And then sort of a version forward would be creating a cloud infrastructure practice that helps people move to the cloud, helps set up cloud technologies and really working with that. And then a version 5 would be leveraging the Cloud Service Providers AI tools and pointing those AI tools at specific software and helping to deploy and configure specific software. Leveraging the cloud service provider AI tools. Right. And getting them to a good state, say a 70 or 80% state using machines and then the final leg, the next 20 or 30 using humans. Right. Your scalability will be able to increase. Your, your value in the marketplace will, will be proliferated, it will be maintained.
Brennan Lynch [00:18:48]:
Right. You're not just a place with a bench, you're replaced with a bench who knows how to use the new AI tools to configure and deploy software that doesn't natively have it built into their packages. So that's sort of my version one to five for a partner.
Patrick Riley [00:19:05]:
It's interesting because it does put extra lift on you as the ISV initially. Right. We mentioned that, you know, everything's moving this way. There's a ton of adopters already and you mentioned a couple company names from a reseller perspective, but there's still a lot of resellers out there that ISVs are having to go sell y Marketplace and sell that. You know, this is the right thing to do. And you're still having to constantly go not only train the reseller on your technology, so on cyberark, but now you're adding in. Okay. Also, we want to teach you how to ask procurement questions so that we could take our product through Marketplace.
Patrick Riley [00:19:43]:
I think that's a burden right now that hopefully will get better, but it falls on you, the ISV at the moment, to get them on board. It's an important point you bring up that we need to train the resellers on how to do this if we want to see the value and we want to leverage them to help us grow our, our account base.
Brennan Lynch [00:20:04]:
I think it is important for the partner community to really understand that, you know, this is where the money is and we're all looking for the money. We're all looking to help our client out. We're all looking to, you know, be as successful in an account as we can. And simple questions help uncover budgets, help you help the client better. Right. Do you have a cloud service provider? You know, are you hosting things in the cloud? Do you have a SaaS solution provider? Yes.
Brian Denker [00:20:35]:
No.
Brennan Lynch [00:20:35]:
Maybe so. Yes. Okay. Who is it? Who is your cloud service provider? You know, what technologies do you put in the cloud? What technologies are you looking to put in the cloud? Right. Get an idea of where they're looking to go and who they're looking to do it with. So then you can pick up the phone and call the rep from whoever cloud service providers and say, hey, look, you know, I'm working with them on these projects. They're looking to bring these technologies into the cloud. When you start bringing those cloud service providers, you know, additional consumption, that's called leaning in on their perspective.
Brennan Lynch [00:21:10]:
And they're going to, they're going to pivot and they're going to do what they can to help you out. Right. If I'm a partner and I'm there and I'm working with the chief procurement officer, and I think I have a pretty good off, you know, relationship with the CISO because he comes to our golf events and yada, yada, yada, but then I can engage with someone whose entire budget they're managing with this customer probably outstrips your entire company's total revenue. I think I'm going to go work with that guy because he seems to know where the money is and he seems to be controlling it all. And I'm going to go work with that resource from the cloud service provider and talk to him about all the initiatives that I'm looking to do with the customer and go from there. Right. I would embrace them like they were a brother and say, come on, let's go do this together. Let's go use your budgets.
Brennan Lynch [00:22:00]:
You know, let's go out to dinner and use your credit card.
Patrick Riley [00:22:03]:
Sitting here on our side, I get to see the amount of work. Well, I think the most of the amount of work that's going on with folks like yourself who are not only, for lack of better words, courting their internal sales teams to adopt buying and selling your product on Marketplace, but now also you're doing this with the partners. Maybe ISVs don't have a partner team to do that. What Are some recommendations or how do you see cyberark scaling to help continue to support this expansion? Is this something that you alone, like an alliance's leader, should have to handle? How does somebody listening to this, who's one or two people running their alliances, practice? They're multi cloud and they're trying to figure out how do I bring my resellers into this and train my sellers? What's that look like for them?
Brennan Lynch [00:22:55]:
Well, that's where we kind of take a step into your internal organization at the isv. And you look to your channel team, you look to your channel leadership, you look to your CRO, your sales leadership, you look to your cfo, you help them understand how this is financially beneficial to your company and to the customer. And then you start engaging them. I always say start at the top down with your cfo, your CEO and your CRO, making sure that they understand that this is where the money is. This is a great way to transact. I love it when we do big deals through Marketplace with a partner. And the cyberark seller says to me, after the deal's done, I want to do all my deals this way. Like, never have I ever in my prior 25 years heard that until I started doing marketplaces.
Brennan Lynch [00:23:41]:
And it's great. I want to have it as a ringtone then. You want to get your channel managers involved, Right. You want to help them understand why this is of value to them, why they shouldn't be afraid of this, how this is going to help them meet their initiatives and their goals with their channel partners. Right. I mean, the great thing about working with cloud service providers is there's no training requirements for it. Right. So it's one less thing for a channel manager to have to do.
Brennan Lynch [00:24:06]:
And I would say structure the organization properly. Make it not internally competitive. Right. If the deal goes through Marketplace, your channel manager should get paid the same as if it doesn't go through Marketplace. Right. Make your channel organization calm, neutral, so that they work with you, not against you. Your channel managers are the ones out there in the front lines in the regions where their channel partners, they should be very supportive of this type of motion. Help them understand that, you know, and I always say comp plans drive behavior.
Brennan Lynch [00:24:40]:
So if you want a certain type of behavior, structure a comp plan that's going to get you there. Right. And there's a variety of different ways to do that. Right. You can have comp neutrality for your marketplace deals. You can take your, your marketplace listing fees and include them as cloud infrastructure costs. There's a Variety of different ways you account for this, you can do you comp positive for say, your CPPO deal so that you drive that behavior to transact through the marketplace via your reseller community. There's several different sort of motions you can do that essentially will pay for themselves.
Brennan Lynch [00:25:13]:
Right. If you look at, you know, your growth trajectory and your lack of internal competition, also you start looking at, as an isv, your competitors, you know which of your competitors can transact in marketplaces and which can't. You know, if you can and you don't have any encumbrance, then you're more likely to win a deal. When you come up against a competitor who doesn't have a good marketplace practice and doesn't really have a good understanding of how to leverage their channel community with it. Right. And bring their channel community along.
Patrick Riley [00:25:46]:
Yeah, we've had some, some great use cases lately. So the Tackle Prospect tool, I know you use it heavily. That helps you figure out, you know, which cloud provider the, the company's most likely to buy through. We've had companies get together with the resellers. They basically analyze the opportunities that they thought they could win this quarter. Those that had competitors in it and then they said, hey, we're competing with this competitor. We know they're not on Marketplace. We're going to send these five accounts to this reseller and just spend our time enabling that reseller to go sell on Marketplace for those accounts and seen a huge competitive advantage.
Brennan Lynch [00:26:23]:
Brilliant. If I was an indirect route to market provider, a reseller or gsi, I would take my entire forecast of pipeline and run it with Tackle Prospect and determine what of my accounts are Azure, gcp, AWS or not, and then engage those cloud service providers in the selling process. Right. For the most part, they're not going to sell against you, you know, for cybercric, they're never going to sell against us. And for that, the higher probability is you're going to get more services and helping move that client to cloud. They're desperate to have channel partners do more services and moving clients to the cloud.
Patrick Riley [00:27:06]:
So, Brian, we've talked about kind of the benefits and some of the challenges we've seen the role of enabling partners. But at the end of the day to do these transactions, you know, when you first started this business, companies would have to go outside a marketplace to compensate the reseller. Now you've got things like CPPO in place to help facilitate these transactions. Can you talk a little bit about like what you've seen and how this has evolved and what type of investment you think that the cloud providers will make or continue to make in making transactions with resellers easier on the marketplace?
Brian Denker [00:27:44]:
Yeah, for sure. I mean we spoke a little bit before. There was an initial kind of push against partners from both sides really, I think three, four years ago. And now you've seen all the major CSPs lean into having a full program that's now public. And I think where we see some of the stuff really going, which is interesting, is CPPO is kind of a standard reseller model, one tier, some people call it two tier, but we're actually seeing the model move now into like a potential three tier. Right. There are, there are complex deals that sometimes, you know, there's hardware involved and so there's a distributor, sometimes there's financing involved so there's a finance partner. And so I think where some of this stuff gets pretty exciting is hearing the CSVs talk about where they kind of envision this going, where there's like multi party mechanisms in place for this and we're able to bring everybody into the story.
Brennan Lynch [00:28:42]:
And I do think that's where some of the stuff is going, right? If you need to have finance partners, you need to have distribution partners, you need to have a geographic partner, all those things are being taken into account and I think we're going to see a lot of that coming down the road in the next 12 to 18 months. I'm hearing all the CSPs chatting about it this year. The one tier single tier model with a reseller is kind of being done on all CSPs and it's growing and it's great. And I think where people are going now is like how do we actually have other people participate in that deal? Because that is the way things actually happen out in the real world and they want to be able to capture more and more of that. I did want to throw over one kind of cool advantage too. It made me think of it when Brendan was saying is, I think when you look at a reseller based model as well, if you're an ISV and you're selling and you're selling direct, it's great and you're renewing and doing your things, your product is providing value. But when you've got the services, like Brendan was saying, when you've got the someone out there on the ground at those companies driving that services, you, you really can positively affect your retention rate and your kind of expansion rate as well. Right.
Brian Denker [00:29:47]:
Because you, you can only cover so much ground with your own Field sales team. Right. And if you've got resellers kind of doing a one to many version of that through your channel team, it's great. Like, you know, here's Brennan managing multiple partners that are all managing multiple deals across multiple accounts. Right. And obviously big deals may go direct through their A team, but being able to expand to a smaller and a wider area geographically or vertically based on specific resellers is really big. So just something for folks to think about a little bit. I love the idea of kind of expanding and enabling the reseller rate to drive better attention and better expansion over the course of years.
Brennan Lynch [00:30:26]:
Yeah. And speaking of expansion, we're seeing MSP now transacting through Marketplace. So not just straight licenses, msp, you know, because they're leveraging the cloud infrastructure spend. Right. I think more and more people are becoming aware like that is a very large budget at most companies that cloud infrastructure spend. If you can attach your, your project and your transaction to that, then there's a lot more funding for your project or your, your transaction. Right. We've seen deals go as much as 10x just because they pivoted from non cloud infrastructure spend to cloud infrastructure spend.
Patrick Riley [00:31:04]:
Big boost there. I know. I'm excited because I came from a large enterprise, we sold hardware and software, we had distribution, we couldn't do what we wanted to do in Marketplace. So I know there's a lot of big enterprises that are just really looking forward to these changes. Denker, that you've been mentioning. But as we look ahead for you, Brendan, what trends do you see shaping the future of partner driven success and marketplaces for Cyberark?
Brennan Lynch [00:31:33]:
Well, one of the things we've been working on with AWS specifically since they launched it a few years back, is their standard agreement for Marketplace. And I see probably Microsoft and Azure GCP coming up with this as well. But the standard agreement for Marketplace is a bilateral SAS EULA that if the client has accepted it, and we've already accepted it, we've actually helped create the version 2.0. We created it, we gave a lot of consulting on it. It negates the need for us to have to do a bespoke SaaS EULA for Cyborg. So when you think about sales cycles, right. We look at this though, and we think about, well, gosh, you know, negotiating a eula, our own specific EULA that takes sales cycles, right. And if we can just go in and the client has accepted the AWS standard agreement for Marketplace and it's done and we just get to do the deal Right.
Brennan Lynch [00:32:24]:
And we all know time kills deals. And I think about that from a partner perspective. They should be thinking about this. They should be talking to their ISVs and saying, hey, what leverage points do you have with the cloud service providers when we want to go through a cloud service provider? Have you accepted the AWS standard agreement for marketplace? Are you part of Azure's programs? Right. Do you understand GCP's models? They should be impressing upon them, right? The value, right? And then I see startups and companies now starting to look at when they're creating a channel program. The first place they go to look to recruit partners is say AWS's CPPO partner list, their PDF that's publicly available, right? You can Google it, right? Or Azure's list. They're recruiting partners who are already actively engaged. They just want to make life easy for them.
Brennan Lynch [00:33:18]:
Them, they don't want to have to convert people over, right? I see that as some basic operational trends. Where I see business going is what I alluded to before was partners doing their own marketplace listings for services. Whether it's deploying and configuring ISVs technologies or it's creating bespoke results based offerings, leveraging several different ISVS technologies, all packaged under their own sort of label. I see another area where you start, see these data lakes, right? Brian, you're probably aware of AWS's big data lake, right? And they want everybody to dump their stuff into it. And that's great. But then how do you make sense out of that? How do you know what stuff you need to grab and where to grab it and how to organize it? Right? A partner who knows all the technologies that a customer has because hopefully they've sold them all of that, right? They're going to have a better understanding of how to organize that data lake and how to organize that data lake data into information. And I think smart partners are going to start creating practices where they're taking data and they're making into information. Because data is just the ingredients, right? Information is the result.
Brennan Lynch [00:34:38]:
It's the cake, it's the pie, it's the blended margarita. Whatever you want to call it, it is the result and there's money to be made there because so many of our custom don't have the aptitude or the cycles to make information from data. Right? And then I think the other thing I mentioned, the role, smart partners are really going to start leaning in and understanding the different AI tools that the cloud service providers are creating and understanding how to, instead of being afraid of these tools and being afraid it's going to displace their bench, enable their bench. At CES, Accenture announced that they're training 300,000 of their employees on AI tools. That means that all their consultants are going that way. And so if I'm, say, a channel partner, I at least have one guy who understands how to point an AI tool and tune it and ask the proper questions. There's classes you can take now on just how to properly format questions to an AI tool to get the best, best sort of possible answers out of it, and how to train your AI tools. Right.
Brennan Lynch [00:35:46]:
Get guys doing that so that you can deploy your ISV solutions that much quicker. Probably be able to charge a little bit more per rate and get onto your next gig. I see that as kind of the next place. Now, I'm not a channel partner. I'm not going to say that this is where it's going. This is just kind of what I. What I think. This is what I see.
Patrick Riley [00:36:06]:
I think you're onto something because as we were researching this topic to come out with, one of the questions I wanted to ask you was around AI tools and how those technologies could impact the role of partners creating these solutions. So I think there's evidence that this is already starting to happen. Tackle itself is leveraging these technologies to help us in making all of our partners more successful. So I think that you're onto something there. And I'm very curious to see what the second half of 2025 looks like when you have more AI adoption, more resellers on marketplace and more resellers plus ISV solutions out there. So I think that'll be quite interesting to see.
Brennan Lynch [00:36:51]:
Yeah, I think the interesting question with AI is what will people do? Right. And that's the broad question to ask yourself, what will people do? And then apply it to whatever industry you're in. Right. So if you're a reseller, what will my people do with, you know, the continued proliferation of AI and human intelligence and super intelligence? Right. And then how can I leverage that to my benefit rather than being abjectly terrified and hiding in your bunker? Right. Go out, embrace it, Figure out what. What will people do?
Patrick Riley [00:37:24]:
Well, so, Brian, where do you see the biggest opportunities for Tackle and other companies, service partners, et cetera, enabling partner success in Marketplace? What do you feel like is the biggest opportunity for us to go after there?
Brian Denker [00:37:38]:
You know, it's been pretty exciting as we think about that. So obviously we're going to pace. We're tied in with the product teams and all the major CSPs, we're going to paste their releases. But it comes back to where Brendan was talking about. The data is. The data is the raw ingredients. So I think, you know, we already have Tackle Prospect, which does some amazing things about just mapping up, but we can take that to the next level. And I think what you're going to see us release over the course of 2025 is some really amazing stuff around more pointed recommendations, right.
Brennan Lynch [00:38:09]:
And be able to recommend things specifically around channel partners, right? Like if you're an isv, if you're a cyberark and you get some inbound leads, you get a lot of opportunities that come in. You know, you may not know which channel partner to work with, right. And we can recommend which ones have relationships there. I mean, we're tracking, you know, almost a billion dollars a month now of transactions, and we capture all of those transactions, whether they're CPPO or direct. So we know an amazing amount of information about, you know, who's selling where with what partners, across what demographics, across what verticals. Right. And so we're starting to create some really neat algorithms that are anonymized, but that allow ISVs to actually go and drive success with partners that are going to be more aligned with those outcomes. So I think you're going to see a ton of stuff with data coming down that road.
Brennan Lynch [00:38:59]:
I also think you're going to see a lot of, as these APIs come out across the CSPs, I think integrating that into the tools where folks live in Salesforce, you know, we are manifesting the entire Tackle platform and then some into Salesforce. And so bringing that together with multi party co Sell, for instance, that is just being released this month with AWS, right? It's like now you've got channel partners and ISVs with Tackle all kind of in the middle, like, you know, registering deals. And now you can do, you know, you can find out where those deals and what the propensities are to buy. And so all of that stuff coming together, the marketplace is just as Brennan says, it's just the cash register to do the deal. But, like, there's so much more stuff in front of it now that can be intelligent. So much stuff around the data and like driving sales efficacy across the teams. Like, we all don't want to just go co sell every deal across every partner, across every cloud. Like, it's just noise, right? And so how do we specifically drive the right deals to the right partners, in the right spaces, to the right clouds, right? And so driving that Sales efficacy, I think is what you're going to see tackle Enable this year.
Brian Denker [00:40:05]:
I'm really excited to see some of these early partners come on and, and working with some of that, that data and working with some of those tools in the next, next couple of quarters.
Brennan Lynch [00:40:13]:
And you know, Patrick, I have one other thing to add in and this doesn't go in with this slot. You can edit it and put it in a different slot maybe if you want. But it's something I think we forgot to really Talk about IS ISVs integrations with cloud service providers and where a partner can go and take those integrations to derive revenue. You know, is there value in charging services to integrate, say a particular technology from an ISV into a cloud service provider native service? Right. Is someone's configuration of an ISV leveraging too many S3 buckets and could you make it, you know, more deployed, more efficiently so it consumes less cloud service provider tools and technology? Right. There's a real model there for reseller partners or consulting partners or GSIS to go and create more efficiency in SaaS solutions and how much cloud services they're consuming to leverage the integrations, to connect the integrations. Right. And then if they're really smart, they'll take integrations between the cloud service providers and multiple ISVs and create a bespoke offering that creates a results based solution for the client community.
Brennan Lynch [00:41:33]:
So I think that's going to be a very interesting market for smart partners to go. It takes a little bit more work and a little bit more detail. But you know, you start building the foundation now, it won't be that difficult down the road. You just kind of keep adding it in. But then you'll also understand, you know, where there are gaps and say the data lake and where the integrations don't exist and where you can extract information out of the data lake. There's brands that Cyborg say doesn't integrate to, but it would probably be great if our information was shared together in a specific client's environment. Go grab that out of the data lake, put it together in a single pane of glass for the customer in charge for as a service would be great. Or as an msp.
Brennan Lynch [00:42:13]:
The model for MSP could be really interesting if you start leveraging the cloud service provider integrations and the data lakes that they all have and creating that single pane of glass and that managed.
Patrick Riley [00:42:25]:
Offering for the cloud and do that with your new AI tools.
Brennan Lynch [00:42:29]:
The AI tools is sort of a given. Right. You definitely leverage it with the AI.
Patrick Riley [00:42:33]:
Tools Those are good points. I think how those integrations will morph and evolve are going to also shape what peers do you know? We'll see this marketplace operation, if you will, is starting to see more open source type solutions anyway. So it'll be, it'll be interesting for me to see how much of that continues, how much do they continue to lean on integrators like Tackle to help deliver those. And yeah, it'll be a fun year.
Brennan Lynch [00:43:02]:
Exciting times. Can't wait to see what people do.
Patrick Riley [00:43:05]:
Where can people find out more about Brennan, I know you've been busy. The cloud providers keep asking you to go speak at their events and all over the world now. So thanks for taking time to be with us. But where, where can we find you next?
Brennan Lynch [00:43:18]:
You know what? You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Brennan lynch on LinkedIn for now. I'm not sure where my next speaking engagement is, but I'll let you know and we'll go from there.
Patrick Riley [00:43:28]:
All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us today with Brennan lynch from Cyberark and co founder of Tackle here, Brian Denker. This was another episode of Unlock Cloud Go to Market. I'm your host, Patrick Riley. We look forward to talking to you next time.
Speaker B [00:43:43]:
So pull up a chair, grab a notebook and join us as we share the essential stages of the maturity model to start, optimize and grow your company's revenue using the cloud. For more resources on executing your cloud, go to Market strategy, you can visit our website at Tackle IO.