| |
|
|
|
|
APERE LAUNCHES NOVEL CHANNEL PROGRAM - CRN Canada
|
|
|
By Andrew McKay
Monday, October 2, 2006
Startup Apere has unveiled its formal channel program, a follow-up to the July launch of its product line...
The company has signed on six partners to sell its Identity Managed Access Gateway (IMAG), an identity management appliance that ensures users only get access to the applications they are authorized to see. An additional 10 solution providers are expected to forge partnerships with Apere soon, said Jared Hufferd, vice president of business development and sales at Apere...
|
“The business problem we’re trying to solve is that the IT manager has to provide access to sensitive data [including applications and network usage], all while keeping security best practices and staying within regulations,” Hufferd said...
Ram Jayam, Apere president and CEO, is no newcomer to the startup world. This is his third company, with a team that’s been together for over 20 years, he said. He also has channel experience, having come over from Adaptec’s channel business.
“We’ve put together a very innovative channel program,” Jayam said.
Jayam said Apere’s channel will be pivotal helping it take on competition from Tivoli and the like.
“Usually, we’ve seen less than 50 per cent satisfaction with these large enterprise deployments,” he said.
The issues, Jayam said, centre around integration, deployment, cost, business disruption and policy management. Other then cost, these are all areas where the channel makes its money.
For customers, identity management can be a complex project, said Aubrey Brown, founder and president of Corsa Netwrok Technologies.
“You need to be able to take your solution and pull down all of the identity information contained in those identity stores. It could be 25 to 30 locations where that ID info is stored,” Brown said. “We’ve enthralled with what Apere has done. They have a very complete solution that’s quite inexpensive compared to alternatives, and it’s easy to implement.”
The new Team Partner Program offers VAR and integrator partners two levels: Free Agent, which provides a onetime finders fee for referrals, and Most Valuable Partner, for partners providing full solutions.
The company also is offering MDFs and a deal-registration program that provides participating partners with a 20-point advantage over other partners on registered opportunities.
“Out objective is to partner with partners with a good understanding of integration,” Jayam said.
And the company’s got a long list of targets for potential VARs; aside from integration expertise, the company would also like to recruit partners from financial and medical practices. In fact, the company would like to hear from anyone who’s interested.
“We need every bit of exposure we can get out there,” Jayam said.
IMAG is designed to meet the security and compliance need of midmarket customers, Hufferd said.
“Companies and IT directors have a big problem to overcome. They need to provision access to applications with sensitive data to many different types of users… and they have to balance that with security,” he said.
Though products from vendors such as CA, IBM/Tivoli and Oracle provide some of the same functionality, they do so at a hefty price tag that’s well out of the reach of midsize business, according to Hufferd. With IMAG, partners can build solutions to centrally monitor and manage identity information tied to various applications and housed in disparate locations across customer networks, he said.
IMAG automatically locates all of the identity stores and creates a correlated, “clean” list of user identities and access rights. Customers then can use IMAG for centralized provisioning to create new users or shut down inactive users.
“It really answers what some of these directory technologies promised to deliver,” he said.
In terms of access control, IMAG includes on identity-based pocket filtering firewall that blocks users from accessing applications they don’t have rights to access. IMAG’s Adaptive Access Control feature enables the appliance to interact with current network authentication mechanisms without interfering with them.
-With files from CRN Staff
Hide
|
|
|
|
|
|
