Jen Waltz: Building Trust, Speed, and Scale Through Channel Strategy

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
It Okay. Welcome. Welcome back. Everyone to another episode here at AWS reinvent. Oh my gosh, it's crazy. There's a what is, I guess this is a reception, sort of happy hour kind of thing happening on the show floor. All the partners here, unbelievable. All the partners and attendees at 65,000

Jen Waltz  0:22  
number 65,000 number one partner is works. Man, oh, well, working if you're not working with works man, you should be working with works. Man, right?

Chip Rodgers  0:31  
Well, thank you. Thank you for that, Jen. So I am so excited to be joined today by Jen Wallace. Jen is VP of global channels at Krohn, and Krohn is interesting. Gosh, I want to hear a little bit, maybe tell us a little bit about Krohn you're in the cybersecurity space, and talk about the heritage and how you're working with partners. Let's start with who is Krohn?

Jen Waltz  0:55  
Oh, I'm so glad you asked me chip. So Krohn has been around since the mid, early, 2000s so almost 20 years in business, we specialize in access management in the cybersecurity space, specifically for network admins. So our company's president, lutfe yanell, created this company after his varied experience as managing director for Alcatel and Lucent, and one of the things that he noticed is that network operators did not always have the level of security management that they should have. And so that was the birthplace of Chrome. And so what makes our product super incredible is that we focus on telecommunications industry, companies financial services and also manufacturing. And what we do with our Chrome privilege access management product, which is called Chrome Pam, what we do is we help companies secure their infrastructure by making sure that accidental insider risks don't happen. We mitigate and make sure the admins are protected from information that they shouldn't see. So not only do we traverse a multi tenanted we're the only Pam provider that can provide multi tenancy across all the hyper scalers. In addition to that, yes, and we have amazing technology in which we can mask data so it's protected, whether it's financial HR, and then also, we also can make sure that, you know, most people know that admins typically share passwords. Or our solution, we make sure that they can't share those anymore, but they still are able to basically log in, get a password that and it is time managed, if that makes sense to you. So our solution is flexible. We have over 100 integrations with partners that we, you know, can go and do business with, and we compliment anyone that's already investing in a cyber security stack. We fit like this to make customers, existing investments in cybersecurity, work more. How can I put it securely? So we are the strength and the glue in the middle of those things.

Chip Rodgers  3:10  
Well, that's fantastic. So interesting. So you said you have over 100 integrations. I was going to ask you about partnering. So tell me about how Chrome is partnering and with 100 integrations, you obviously have a lot of technology partners, but I think you also work quite a bit with MSPs and in as in a selling capacity as well.

Jen Waltz  3:31  
Absolutely. So Kron has decided to adopt this year new a strategy with going through the channel. And what makes that so powerful and viable is that, as an ISV, mssps are truly the partners that we need to connect with, as well as hyperscalers. So for the first time, we have official partnerships with all of the hyperscalers, AWS, Microsoft and GCP. We're in their marketplaces. And additionally, not only focusing on the hyperscalers and the mssps, we're looking at data center providers. We're looking at software defined network solution providers like AWS and so on, and really getting the message out to say our technology complements anything you've already invested we're not a rip and replace type of company, but what we do is we make companies like Microsoft and their intra product. We make sure that we plug any gaps, or any perceived gaps, into their technology, making it stronger from a cost efficacy perspective and also from a nimble perspective, we can deploy our solution and educate a client in less than two weeks. Much like, yeah, much like work span and some other other vendors. So very, very cool space for us to be in right now.

Chip Rodgers  4:48  
So how is the how is that transition going? I guess you know the move to to working more with partners.

Jen Waltz  4:57  
Well, you know what's interesting is. It's been super easy. I'm so proud to work for Crone. Our board is visionary. They're thinking through like where you can get the most attraction with partners to not only drive value to Crone, but more importantly, drive value to the partners. That's the key in any partnership. You have to think outside of yourself first and figure out what's important to that partner that's exactly and drive that before you can even remotely receive any benefit from it, because it drives trust. It drives loyalty in a genuine nature.

Chip Rodgers  5:35  
Well, that's fantastic. And Jen, I know you're also an active member and partnership leaders, and love seeing you participate there. That's a great community, huh?

Jen Waltz  5:43  
Also, let me tell you guys, if you have not joined partnership leaders, please join. I became familiar with the community through Asher and Chris samilla and also ty bratigan. I met them for the first time at the catalyst event in Denver, it has been a game changer for me in terms of being connected to people who are my peers, learning community opportunities when you're in the channel, because this is a specialized industry. It takes, it takes finesse. I mean, you can't people might have a misconception about the magic it takes to make channel partnerships work, and it's a hard job. And one of the things that I love about partnership leader is every day I see content from amazing thought leaders like chip and Blake Williams and Greg Portnoy and just so and Lincoln accent, and just, there's so many people that I learned from. It's just been a benefit to me overall. That's

Chip Rodgers  6:49  
amazing. Well, Jen, thank you so much for taking a few minutes out here at reinvent. It's been great to great to catch up, and thanks for sharing your story with partners. And good luck with getting getting you know partners on boarded and activated.

Jen Waltz  7:05  
Thank you so much chip. And for the community, if you're not connecting and working with Chip, you should be. Chip is an amazing, dynamic leader. He's a master at creating value relationships for work span, and it's just a pleasure to know you.

Chip Rodgers  7:20  
Jen, now you're making me blush. Thank you all. Thanks. Thank you, Jen. I appreciate it. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks everybody. You.

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