Drive More Business With New Or Innovative Vendors  

Optiv thinks about its 447 vendor partners differently today than a few years ago, with an emphasis on how the company can help these suppliers get into the market. Some of Optiv’s suppliers are big and voluminous while others are new, and for every vendor that’s subsumed into a larger organization, two more new vendors emerge, according to Lynch.

The company classifies some suppliers with new functionality as innovator partners capable of accelerating Optiv’s line card beyond the tried and true. And for a smaller set of Optiv’s value partners, Lynch believes the future is to wrap Optiv’s services around the vendor’s technology and deliver the entire capability as a service in areas like identity governance or privileged access management.

Optiv classifies a select set of partners as ecosystem partners, meaning that the company intends to take its own intellectual property as well as the intellectual property of the vendor and build something together, according to Lynch. Dramatic vendor consolidation in the security industry would challenge Optiv’s position, but Lynch said there’s no sign of that happening anytime soon.

“There’s long been this discussion of, ’Will the industry consolidate?’ ’Will we get to a platform play of two or three?’ Maybe,” Lynch said. ”And when that day comes, it’ll challenge our position. But right now, for every logo that’s consumed, two more emerge.”