Exclusive: New Infoblox partner program continues its legacy

Infoblox has all the drive and passion of a start-up with the heritage of a veteran company, having been around for more than 20 years. The organisation provides the foundation of internet traffic over the course of its history, and it has evolved with the times to become far more security conscious.

Rather than providing just DNS as it did back in early 2000, Infoblox now provides a suite of platform management solutions around DNS, IP address management, and DHCP. What's important, and what makes the company unique, is its ability to provide visibility of this traffic through the lens of security.

Whilst it's important to have that infrastructure well-managed, it must also be secure. By virtue of the fact that Infoblox covers half of the world's DNS and internet traffic, the company is in a unique position to make that happen.

Commanding that amount of global IP address management, DNS, and DHCP – that is 50% of the world's online population using our product set – Infoblox has access to data that nobody else has. That's an incredible position to be in because this data allows the company to have greater access to the concerns and outcomes of its customers. If an organisation has 10% of the market, it's not a great data set to make assumptions on market direction. If an organisation has a large majority of the customers in a market, it's a really good data set to understand what the challenges are and to put some great minds to analyse and address those challenges.

One thing nearly all internet-connected devices have in common is DNS. Let's consider the number of connected devices we have in 2023 - an estimated 43 billion according to Forbes - and these devices cover a wide range of uses. Cameras, vending machines, trains, and ATMs are good examples. Given how unique each of those device types is, it's easy to understand why most organisations are paralysed by the complexity of trying to secure them. But because Infoblox works with all of these devices, the company can provide security at a very efficient control layer, protecting all equipment.

It does this by providing secure DNS and inspecting traffic that most people don't inspect. Almost every single large breach in the news utilised DNS as part of the attack. Why is this the case? Because as a hacker, you're going to find the path of least inspection, and for the most part, DNS is an aspect of an organisation's network that's not being monitored effectively right now. Infoblox is finding itself at a watershed moment currently as people switch on to how the company can allow them to protect and automate that aspect of their security architecture.

Like most solutions, Infoblox has got competitors in some of the spaces where it operates. However, the company's biggest competitor is the choice to 'do nothing' and ignore the risk. However, as organisations scale up to enterprise and transition to cloud, ignoring the risk becomes extremely difficult.

As enterprises move through the maturity model with cloud, Infoblox is seeing them transition from being "all in" with one cloud provider to genuine multi-cloud strategies. This transition is powered by the move to containerisation, microservices and virtualisation, making workloads and apps more agnostic to the cloud provider and far more portable. There are a number of drivers here, including commercial arbitrage, performance enhancement, leveraging different tools for different needs across their cloud estate and a host of others. Unfortunately, if you are using a cloud vendor's native infrastructure tool, then it makes it nearly impossible to be agile in your cloud usage. So not only does Infoblox provide a far more robust and enterprise-level infrastructure platform, it is also able to work across all of these providers, whether Azure, AWS, GCP, as well as hybrid environments and any mixture of those. The fact that the company can also secure so early in the chain makes it very hard to argue against the significant ROI that its customers are seeing.

Infoblox is very much a channel-only business – it's part of the company's DNA and its first motion. Over the years, the company's channel network has adapted and improved. As you can imagine with a 20-year-old business, channel networks grow organically. However, that is not the best way to go to market today, as you may have hundreds of resellers that might only do one or two transactions with you, little knowledge transfer happens, and the resellers never become part of your extended organisation.

Infoblox has just launched the latest iteration of its partner program across the globe that allows resellers who do decide to lean in and work more closely to benefit more. This includes better training to become more enabled and to engage with the company's go-to-market strategy.

Infoblox is already taking it out to market and seeing some great success. The channel side of the organisation here in APJ is something that the company is continuing to grow, whilst also making it more elegant. Great channel partners are critical, and Infoblox believes they must be part of its DNA for the company to succeed. Its partners continue to have intimacy with its customers, their problems and goals.

In every single aspect of Infoblox's business, whether it be marketing, its go-to-market strategy, the way that the company touches its customers after the sale, partners are an integral part of it all. They're part of Infoblox's business, not just part of its sales organisation.

"I started in November 2022 and my responsibility, as Vice President APJ, is to harness best practices I've experienced in other high growth organisations and then leverage the collective expertise of our extremely talented team across the regions," says Paul Wilcox, Asia Pacific & Japan Vice President, Infoblox.

"The challenge for us is to make sure that our go-to-market is standardised but unique. We're looking to get a level of commonality but also to look at the nuances of each market across the region.

"And for that matter, even if we look at ANZ, there are variations to what is considered an effective GTM across the region.

"It really is about unlocking the incredible potential in the organisation, continuing to lead the market in our core areas of expertise, but helping organisations across the region do that in a simplified, automated fashion but with far more robust security posture."