Vanta Wants ‘Black Belt Ninjas In Security And GRC’ In Revamped Partner Program: Exclusive

‘We are trying to build the GRC industry’s leading global partner ecosystem. That clearly accelerates Vanta’s ARR, increases our reach, increases our win rates and delivers world-class customer outcomes. It’s a tremendous opportunity for our partners,’ says Bill Fitzgerald, vice president of global channel sales and alliances at Vanta.

Vanta is revamping its partner program with a renewed focus on helping partners build profitable, recurring governance, risk and compliance (GRC) practices around its platform.

The San Francisco-based vendor unveiled the Vanta Trusted Network Tuesday, introducing a more structured partner ecosystem that includes three program tiers, expanded enablement, tailored sales and marketing resources, and new opportunities for partners to deliver services throughout the customer life cycle.

The revamped program builds on Vanta’s existing partner ecosystem, which launched in 2022 and has partners in more than 40 countries. The security and compliance vendor now serves more than 20,000 customers and is seeing growing demand for GRC services as enterprises face more security, compliance and AI governance requirements.

For partners, Vanta sees an opportunity to move past one-time software sales and implementation projects toward longer-term advisory and managed services relationships.

“We want to build highly durable businesses for them,” Bill Fitzgerald, Vanta’s vice president of global channel sales and alliances, told CRN in an exclusive interview. “It’s a less-is-more approach. What we’re really doing is creating a curated partner program to go very deep and get our partners to build committed sales, marketing, services and customer success programs around Vanta. That’s really who we want to work with.”

The company organized its partner strategy around six categories: service providers, solution providers, technology partners, audit partners, global systems integrators (GSIs) and cloud service providers. The goal is to build deeper relationships with a selected group of partners rather than expanding the number of companies in its ecosystem.

And the new Vanta Trusted Network is structured around three tiers: Partner, Preferred and Strategic. Higher-tier partners receive additional benefits such as dedicated partner managers, joint business planning, co-marketing support, and differentiated margins based on their engagement, revenue targets and historical performance.

It’s also adding a referral partner program, and partners can build their skills through Vanta Academy, which offers online and in-person training and certifications in sales, presales and solution architecture, implementation and managed services. The vendor also is launching a Slack-based partner community where partners can communicate, register deals and share best practices. Vanta will use Slack channels to post product updates and host regular engineering briefings.

Fitzgerald said one of the biggest opportunities will come when partners begin helping one another solve problems and share expertise.

“The real incredible power of the Vanta partner community will happen when we see partners answering other partners’ questions,” he said. “Our partners talk to each other today across all six of those categories. Now we’re giving them a forum and an environment to do it, not only in person, but also within the Vanta community.”

Romeen Sheth, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Vanta partner Workstreet, said Vanta’s investment in its partner ecosystem comes at a critical time, as security and compliance become more important in the era of AI agents.

“Security and compliance is becoming the defining issue of our time,” Sheth told CRN. “This reflects the belief that customers achieve the best outcomes when all members of the ecosystem collaborate together.”

Partners can advise customers on GRC and security initiatives, manage their Vanta environments, and deliver ongoing services such as virtual CISO support and continuous control monitoring. Larger providers and GSIs can also build managed offerings around enterprise risk management and AI governance.

And Vanta will bring partners into customer opportunities requiring specialized expertise in frameworks such as FedRAMP, CMMC and ISO 42001.

“We want experts. We want black belt ninjas in security and GRC,” Fitzgerald said. “We are trying to build the GRC industry’s leading global partner ecosystem. That clearly accelerates Vanta’s ARR, increases our reach, increases our win rates and delivers world-class customer outcomes. It’s a tremendous opportunity for our partners.”

On Monday, Vanta announced it acquired Pillar Security, an AI security platform that protects agents across their life cycle. Pillar’s runtime protection and adversarial testing will link AI governance policies to guardrails that enforce agent behavior.