Armis Debuts Refreshed Channel Program To Boost Partner Simplicity, Flexibility

The fast-growing cyber exposure management vendor—which recently reached a deal to be acquired by ServiceNow for $7.75 billion—is eliminating program tiers while seeking to better enable a partner’s preferred route to market, executives tell CRN.

Armis unveiled a revamped channel program Wednesday that aims to provide greater simplification and flexibility for partners, in a bid to increasingly rely on solution and service providers for the cybersecurity vendor’s next phase of growth, Armis executives told CRN.

The launch of the new Armis Select Partner Program comes just weeks after the announcement that ServiceNow plans to acquire the cyber exposure management vendor for $7.75 billion. In an interview with CRN, Armis President Alex Mosher and Channel Chief Patrick McCue said the debut of the new program signals a continued commitment to partners—showing that Armis expects to only accelerate its work with the channel going forward.

“The changes in our partner program will position our partners to [work closely] with Armis on what will really be a multi-generation offering,” said Mosher, who also serves as CRO of Armis. “Our commitment to partners will remain long into the future.”

Armis has already seen rapid growth with the help of partners in recent years, with annual recurring revenue recently crossing $340 million, up 50 percent from the year before. The vendor’s AI-powered Centrix platform delivers dramatically improved asset management and security across IT, OT and IoT environments, the company has said.

The introduction of the new channel program is the culmination of efforts by Armis to shift into a “more channel-centric” growth strategy, according to Mosher.

The goal now is to “truly lean in” with partners through an array of updates to improve the simplicity and profitability of working with Armis, he said.

Key updates in the new channel program include eliminating program tiers while seeking to better enable a partner’s preferred route to market, through the introduction of three different routes a partner can choose from. Partners can participate in one or multiple of the three routes—selling, service delivery and joint solutions building, the company said.

The elimination of tiers, meanwhile, ensures that partners of any size can engage just as effectively with Armis and not be put at a disadvantage to larger players, executives said.

Ultimately, from discussions with partners, it became clear that they did not want to be pigeonholed into a certain partner type or tier, said McCue, senior vice president of global partners at Armis.

“They didn't care if they were platinum or silver,” he said. “What they really care about is the engagement level they get from us.”

The simplified approach in the new Armis Select Partner Program should make life easier for solution and service providers by “allowing the partners to engage how they want, when they want and where they want,” McCue said.

The program is also now more flexible in terms of procurement, with greater ability to allow customers to work with multiple partners and procure through an online marketplace if desired, he said.

For instance, if a customer wanted to “go on AWS Marketplace, but they want to use a [system integrator] to do the implementation, but they want to procure with a reseller—we have the ability to do that,” McCue said. “We’ve opened up and we haven't put partners into certain types, which wouldn’t have allowed them to engage together in that way.”

Partner Perspective

For Annapolis, Md.-based Blackwood, No. 93 on CRN’s Solution Provider 500 for 2025, the latest channel program moves from Armis are both well-chosen and timely, according to Blackwood President Ryan Morris.

The new program goes a long way toward helping to remove the complexity involved in many vendor partner programs, which often entail having a “tremendous amount of things to track,” Morris said. “I just need a channel program that's simple, consistent and lucrative.”

In response, Armis is definitely on the right track by “moving away from all of these tiers and requirements to get the different statuses, to achieve different discounts,” he said.

“They’ve just said, ‘We’re going to arm our entire channel with what they need to be successful. We're going to allow them to operate within the go-to-market and the route to market that they're most comfortable in. And then we're just going to make sure that they're able to stack discounts, and earn higher discounts, based on the number of customers they're supporting,’” Morris said.

In other words, “their partner program has evolved, but simplified,” he said. “So I'm excited about the direction that they're taking it.”

ServiceNow Acquisition Deal

The debut of the Armis program is also a welcome signal as the planned acquisition by ServiceNow moves forward, Morris said.

The all-cash deal, which was announced Dec. 23, is expected to close in the second half of 2026, ServiceNow has said.

While the new Armis partner program was in the works prior to the ServiceNow announcement, the fact that Armis is moving forward with the program should make clear to partners that the vendor is deeply committed to the channel and focused on ensuring consistency, executives said.

“The feedback I've gotten from the partners is all about [expressing] excitement that we're still launching this program,” McCue said.

ServiceNow’s proposed $7.75 billion acquisition price values Armis well above its previously achieved valuation of $6.1 billion, which came in connection with the vendor’s $435 million funding round in November.

Founded in 2016, San Francisco-based Armis has been among the most well-funded cybersecurity vendors in recent years, with a total of $1.06 billion raised over four funding rounds since February 2021.

Shifting From Hardware To SaaS

Blackwood has been an Armis partner for about four years, but has seen adoption by customers ramp up significantly over the past year, Morris said.

The growth has come in part from enabling many customers to switch to Armis after their multi-year contracts with legacy, hardware-dependent vendors have concluded, he said.

Armis has stood out with its asset intelligence engine that can analyze network traffic and “discover what's actually communicating on the network—and, with a high degree of confidence, tell you what actually exists across your enterprise network,” Morris said.

While this is massively valuable from a cybersecurity perspective, the Armis platform also enables the stronger resiliency and availability that many organizations are increasingly seeking, he said.

In the past, many approaches to these problems were “incredibly hardware-intensive,” Morris noted.

Such systems “had a hard time keeping up with network traffic and speeds, and they were constantly out of date—and candidly, just not doing a very good job of profiling devices,” he said.

By contrast, with Armis providing discovery of assets through a SaaS-based model, “that architecture itself lends itself so much better to actually understanding new devices as they're created and entering the networks worldwide,” Morris said. “It’s just a more elegant and lower-cost architecture.”