Armis secures foothold with channel partners with APAC base two years on

Two years after cyber security vendor Armis opened an Asia Pacific (APAC) base in Melbourne, the vendor has changed up its operations as well as customised its channel program to meet the needs of local partners.

Back in April 2022, the US-based smart device security vendor opened its Melbourne office and was looking to build on its current customer and channel partner bases. 

At the time, the Israeli-founded company hired nine technical and sales roles, with former Nutanix manager Andrew Draper as its APAC lead. It had around nine channel and integrator partners in Australia: Content Security, Baidam Solutions, Fujitsu, RIoT Solutions, Equate Technologies, IPsec, Murdoch Webster, Outcomex, and Sektor. 

Since then, Evan Thomas, partner business manager for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) at Armis, told ARN that changes to the office took place around 18 months ago.

“We no longer have that office and we work from home, or we use WeWorks,” he said.

Former APAC lead Andrew Draper has also been replaced by Christina Kemper, VP of international sales, as its APAC leader. The local office now has approximately 10 employees.

Thomas said the channel has remained key to Armis throughout these changes.

“I’ve been with the company for three years in January and I was bought on to build out the channel,” he said. “At that point in time, we didn’t have any particular go-to-market or any strategy around channel and channel adoption being a startup.”

According to Thomas, his team was given its own ability to bring in the partners they wanted.

“People have different ideas on what type of partners they want in what areas,” he said. “I purposefully selected partners in the partner community that I knew that I’d had relationships with before that we could build a foundation for success upon and be part of their business and be fundamental to them moving forward.”

So far, Armis has onboarded around 12 to 15 partners across Australia in New Zealand.

“We’ve never been out chasing hundreds and hundreds of partners,” said Thomas. “That’s not the way we’re going to build and scaling in our industry is probably easier with the right partners.”

According to Thomas Armis understands that partners and distributors are multi-vendor and vendors are multi-partner.

“The whole ecosystem works really well together and everybody understands the mechanisms on it … however, our models don’t suit every partner and we are very amicable about that,” he said.

Through its channel partners, it has made some wins in the education and healthcare markets. Most recently, the vendor signed a state department as a customer through a channel partner.

“[We did] an Australian Information Security Registered Assessors Program assessment through that process, although it wasn’t a prerequisite for that department,” he added. “The channel partner was with us through the majority of the process.”

However, the initial process of the proof of value was done by Armis’ local team, but the channel partner was intricate in what it did and is currently assisting the vendor with the rollout.