Saviynt: Identity security is all about processes and not just technology

“We want partners to be ready for the challenges that customers are facing and become more tech-oriented partners through the Saviynt platform,” says Sunil Kedaraji, Vice President of Partner Sales, APJ at Saviynt.

Given the increasing need for identity security by organizations in the Asia Pacific region, Saviynt is relying heavily on its partner ecosystem to ensure they can provide customers with the best tools available and address the common pain points they are experiencing.

According to Sunil Kedaraji, Vice President of Partner Sales, APJ at Saviynt, while they are a heavily consulting-oriented business, the reality is, identity security is all about processes and not just technology. With AI adoption increasing, the processes are changing rapidly. And this is exactly why the partner ecosystem is extremely important to support Saviynt, which is 100% channel driven.

“There are various kinds of partnerships that we have. So traditionally, we heavily relied on consulting partners. That's our big four extension of the world, which basically does a lot of processing consulting, as well as technology consulting and digital transformation. And then we expanded that to the global system integrators, like Indian SIs, Japanese SIs, global SIs and such. So that's where we are working with them on the total transformation part of it. Then when it comes to the adoption into the market, like the rest of ASEAN, Japan, India, we are enabling the local partnership. These are local partners who understand local dynamics, local regulations and local culture to help them adopt or help a customer adopt identity security,” Kedaraji explained.

At the same time, Kedaraji also pointed out that Saviynt is now moving into technology alliances as there are various degrees of solutions which are already in place.

“How do we get the combined intelligence to customers so that they get better prepared with the threat they are facing? How do I integrate with the same solution that they have to get that combined intelligence? Now, we are enabling the marketplace to expedite this growth with our AWS relationship. We do have a comprehensive partner program in place today, which we launched in 2024. We have now added that with the delivery excellence program. Basically, we are helping all of these partners to be get ready and serve their customers through that delivery excellence program,” he added.

Kedaraji also pointed out that most local partners are seeing digital transformation, AI adoption, and compliance driving conversations with customers.

“So, these are the three different ways customers are asking, how do I adopt identity security? Looking at our Converge platform and the partners' understanding of the business processes, we are at a place to address all those questions,” he said.

Partner enablement

When it comes to ensuring partners are well prepared to deal with customers, Kedaraji highlighted that Saviynt University is a unique platform that delivers the enablement for partners.

“It is not just an ad hoc enablement for us. We are not looking to just do one session kind of enablement. The concept behind Saviynt University is that we take a partner, for example, take a local partner in Thailand, onboard that partner and their strategy to how to build them, helping them understand what identity security is and how to position it to their customer. Then we go into them and share how to position it, how to demo it, how to use it and how to eventually deliver this successfully,” he explained.

Kedaraji also mentioned that with Saviynt University having all those elements of training available and certification, it is given as a free of cost to the strategy partners in the region.

“To add on that, we have people in Singapore who also help deliver those training and enablement as well. We have a bigger training team in India as well. We just did our first L100 Japanese training as a part of Japanese localization investment a couple of weeks back. So, we do have those people and processes through Saviynt University to do that enablement, and we continue to invest that into the region,” he said.

Growing the ecosystem

When asked what he is hoping to get back from partners with all this enablement, Kedaraji stated that Saviynt wants partners to be ready for the challenges which customers are facing and that they can be become more tech-oriented partners through the Saviynt platform.

“That's the way to solve the current challenges which their customers are facing, be it from the transformation point of view, be it from an AI adoption point of view, or be it from a compliance point of view. That's the main goal, making our partners to enable to address that challenge,” he added.

Meanwhile, Dan Mountstephen, Senior Vice President, APJ at Saviynt shared in an interview with CRN Asia shared that as Saviynt are “experts in building world-class software”, they rely exclusively on partners to scale and grow throughout the region. These can either be through technology partnerships with AWS, CrowdStrike, Zscaler, etc or the delivery partners like Accenture, IBM, and so on, or even the local partners, NCS, Ensign InfoSecurity, and so on.

“The challenge that I've set out for our partner organization is to build a repeatable delivery engine where we're providing the minimal amount of expert services for our partners who have carried those identity security products over the last 10, 15 years. They've had the legacy tools from Privileged Access Management and on-premises identity governance tools. And to reskill those organizations, help them build out those benches of capability so that they can build a profitable repeatable practice,” Mountstephen explained.

He believes this will allow Saviynt to continue to grow in a predictable fashion and put the right resources in place to enable those channel partners as they grow throughout the region.

“I've got to say so far, it seems to be working really well. We're getting great feedback from our partners, but most of our investments are there to support the partner community,” he concluded.