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THE IAM IMPERATIVE
Nobody knows that better than Eric Blatte, director of worldwide channel sales and programs for Imprivata Inc., in Lexington, Mass., makers of the OneSign family of IAM solutions. The company’s OneSign Single Sign- On product costs about $60,000 for 1,000 users (including hardware, software, and implementation services, but not the additional strong authentication hardware some customers require). Just the same, Blatte says, more than half of Imprivata’s customers have between 200 and 5,000 users, putting them squarely within the SMB segment.

Still, to sell something that pricey to an SMB you must aim high within the organization. Andy Swenson, managing director of security and infrastructure at Tribridge Inc., a Tampa, Fla.- based Imprivata reseller, usually calls on a CEO or business owner when making an IAM pitch. Often, he notes, such top-level executives initially have trouble understanding why they need IAM. “These guys eat risk for breakfast,” Swenson says, “[and they will] take the risk if they can. They’d rather spend their money somewhere else.”

But where necessity (read: regulatory requirements) dictates, an IAM sale is relatively straightforward, if not simple. In healthcare, for example, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) puts providers under a strict requirement to ensure the privacy of patient data. Similar laws, such as the Gramm- Leach-Bliley Act, require financial services companies to protect customer data too. Another factor, according to Swenson: “Companies in [financial] industries are much more driven to protect their reputation, and IAM can help them do that. Would you want to put your money in a bank that has been hit in an attack?”

Swenson has already sold three Imprivata solutions and has a handful more in the pipeline. That’s a good thing, because getting up to speed on the technology took him and his colleagues several months. “You can’t just pick this up and play with it,” says Swenson. “If you try to go on a sales call without training, you’re going to look bad. It will be bad for you, bad for the vendor, bad for the prospect.”

Blatte agrees on the importance of training. “We spend a lot of time educating our channel partners,” he says, adding, though, that the type of VAR most likely to succeed at selling IAM solutions already has a fair degree of technical expertise in security. “We’re not trying to teach people security,” he says. “We teach them the right questions to ask and how to execute a demo.”