Tanium’s Converged Endpoint Management solution is giving customers much-needed protection from security threats, as well as saving CIOs money. Todd Palmer, Tanium’s SVP of global partner sales, is on a mission to spread the word in Europe.
Todd Palmer is enjoying being back on the road again. The senior vice president of global partner sales at Converged Endpoint Management (XEM) solutions provider Tanium has been on a mini European tour recently, taking in several European countries, including England, where the company is looking to expand rapidly in the coming years.
After the years of COVID, where he was grounded in the US, Todd is racking up the air miles again – he reckons he is on the road about 80% of the time – and is relishing meeting people again and spreading the word about Tanium and how the company’s XEM solution can help businesses.
This was showcased recently at Tanium’s Converge World Tour, which kicked off at the London Landmark Hotel on April 18, and showcased Tanium’s XEM solution, which Todd says is needed more than ever by businesses now.
“Over the past 12 months the level of threat has quintupled; the threat to companies now is amazing,” he says. “Cyber threats are here to stay, and we’ve got to learn how to manage them and run profitable businesses that are still open for partners, co-workers and contractors to be able to work with and communicate with you but remain secure from attack.”
This is where Tanium comes in, providing a converged solution that integrates IT and security in one easy-to-use platform – something that Todd says is not done by others in the sector.
Converging on threats
“The cybersecurity industry is a collection of individual point products and it’s been that way for a long time,” Todd says. “There’s been a threat and a company has come up with a fantastic individual point product to solve that specific issue.”
However, while this may solve a specific problem, it doesn’t make a business more secure from new threats. “If you look at businesses out there, I would venture that over the last five years, their cybersecurity budget has quintupled, yet many don’t feel any safer today than they did before. It’s because it’s flawed; the individual point products don’t integrate or operate together, there’s no context. In a typical security threat in an organisation, you’ve got to identify that threat, quarantine it, figure out which other machines are potentially impacted by it and quarantine those and then you’ve got to apply a type of a patch associated to that threat and push it out throughout your organisation.”
Often, businesses can end up with a variety of individual point products that address different threats but don’t operate together. This is where Tanium’s approach differs, Todd says. Tanium has one platform, where additional technology and security can be turned on as soon as the need arises. “It is one user interface, so if there’s a patch, or a remediation, if there’s compliance or sensitive data, that all is one agent that does all that. And this is done at scale, which is needed because of the number of threats occurring.
All this is done through one platform and one agent, creating a single pane of glass that IT ops, risk and cybersecurity teams can use to access real-time data about their environment. Tanium’s approach is to support collaboration between IT security and IT operations because they must be tightly integrated to form the strongest protection for the organisation.
Tanium’s solution also fits with today’s hybrid workforce, Todd adds. “The challenging thing is in most large enterprises is that they have a variety of devices accessing their network, but they only know about 75% of those devices. And so how do you protect your business effectively if you don’t even know what is actually accessing your network and on your network? One of the beauties of Tanium is that I can discover 100% of the assets that are tapping into the network and 100% of the endpoints.”
Financial sense
Not only is Tanium’s approach more time efficient, but it is also more financially efficient, Todd adds. “Economic growth is slowing around the world and businesses are looking for savings, and often one of the first places that people look to is the IT in an organisation. But how do you cut costs, while also still trying to grow revenues and keep pace in the industry?
“The first place a lot of CIOs are going to look is at the proliferation of individual point products and how those can possibly be consolidated. Some have six or seven individual point products that all have different user agreements, licences and costs associated to it.
“I think our value proposition in an economic environment like this is really good; it is more secure, more efficient and can save customers up to 30% of their current spend. That’s the value proposition that we have for customers right now. That’s why across the world, most of the biggest companies on the planet operate Tanium.”
“Forrester reports Tanium driving ROI of more than 200% for customers, [and is] why eight of top 10 global financial institutions and seven of the top 10 global retailers trust Tanium to maximise their ROI and simplify their technology environments while defending their organisations against emerging threats and expanding their knowledge of managing risk, securing technology and unlocking innovation at scale from a single intuitive platform.”
Servicing smaller companies
But Tanium isn’t just for the biggest companies in the world. While in the past, Tanium did focus on the larger end of the market in Europe – users with 50,000 end points and above – this is now changing, Todd notes.
“We had a white-glove support model, which was an on-premise-based solution that required support, but three years ago we created Tanium as a Service – now called Tanium Cloud – which requires zero infrastructure and now gives us the ability to service much companies, down to those with 1,000 end points,” he says.
“That is the fastest growing part of our business by orders of magnitude – our number of customers has doubled in the previous year and our emerging enterprise business is growing triple digits.
“The company realised we had to build a robust partner ecosystem to be able to serve and support customers at scale. That’s what we have been busy doing over the past three years.”
Tanium’s growth is coming in a wide range of sectors, including financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, government and defence, Todd adds.
Todd adds that Tanium’s XEM solution offers a compelling value proposition for partners. “Tanium has five solutions or 13 modules,” he says. “If you are selling or recommending IT architecture, it is an annuity for your business; you can go in there, solve a problem for customers and sell them additional modules in the platform to solve other business problems. On top of that, there is the services opportunities for partners helping their customers maximise their investment in terms of implementation and integration. We have partners building robust managed services powered by Tanium technology or operating Tanium for their customers.
“Aside from the annuity software sale and the tremendous opportunity around services, it is very compelling business-wise and financially for our partners.”
New CEO
Tanium is focused on growth across the board, which will be driven by its recently appointed new CEO, Dan Streetman, who has been tasked with taking the company to the next level.
“Everyone at Tanium is really excited about Dan’s arrival,” says Todd. “He is a ‘go to market’ person, with great experience in scaling technology companies, and he has an extensive background in partners and the channel. Given we are a partner-first organisation and our go to market model it should be a match made in heaven.”
Focus on scale
Todd says that Tanium is now focusing on scaling its XEM platform across Europe and is targeting the 1,000-plus end point user market. “We are building a partner ecosystem and hiring people in a variety of countries throughout Europe,” says Todd. “It has been a great market for us – our business has doubled in the past couple of years in Europe, which we are very proud of.
“This emerging market is a big opportunity for us. Although we have grown our business tremendously in Europe in recent years, we still have a small market share. Fast forward a couple of years we want to be the de facto leader in endpoint security and endpoint IT operations management, and I think we have a great opportunity to do that.
“The team in Europe are excited about our future and opportunity ahead and hopefully our partners are too because we have a compelling value proposition for our partners.
“We ultimately want to be a market share leader in the markets that we serve. We want to be the best place to work for our employees. From a partner perspective, we want to be the most compelling vendor that companies can partner with. Lots of work for us to do but lots of opportunities for us to grow too.”
