Suppose: as a provider of application security and availability, you have wonderful products, but insufficient technical knowledge among your partners to turn that into orders. What do you do then? You look for a partner who does have that knowledge and you find Cortexia. At least, that’s how it was at F5. In exchange, Cortexia gets, among other things, access to the extensive network of ‘the inventors of load balancing’.
Laundry list of security companies
The brand-new partnership means a step outside the comfort zone in a way for Cortexia, which has no real sales department of its own. However, we see this as a challenge to develop ourselves further. Astrid van Luijken, Channel & Distribution Manager Benelux at F5, has personal experience of this. Originally, she comes from the civil-law notary’s office, but after excursions at Shell and in the hotel business, she ended up in the IT world. There, she quickly added a laundry list of companies to her CV, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise Security Products, Riverbed, Trend Micro and F5.
Certified technical expertise
‘At F5, we have increasingly focused on applications rather than networks in recent years. As far as we were concerned, the intended partner should ideally be at home in both worlds,’ Astrid explains. ‘A colleague who has the public sector in his portfolio put forward Cortexia. He knew that their employees, who are seconded to all kinds of organisations, have deep and certified technical knowledge. And that from that knowledge, they understand what we do at F5. After some good conversations with Nordin from Cortexia, that story proved to be true and that they are willing to go a step further than other parties.’
Reference case and deal registration
‘These are often more interested in selling licenses than in inquiring about how many applications are in circulation with the end user, where they are and how they are secured. Among other things, I put Cortexia in touch with one of our distributors, Westcon, who do online campaigns and help end-users with education, among other things. After Westcon gave some Cortexia employees a short and intensive training on our products and working methods, we have already recently jointly called a list of accounts to acquire new customers. In addition, we are working on a reference case of our services for a government agency and a deal registration is ongoing with an innovative electronics manufacturer.’
Gold partner
‘Depending on their sales and marketing efforts, Cortexia can move up to Silver, Gold or Platinum Partner. Based on their certifications and accreditations alone, they actually already claim Gold status. For the longer term, we want to link Cortexia to one of our three portfolio pillars, namely BIG-IP, NGINX for load balancing and microservices and Distributed Cloud. The latter pillar is mainly about communication between multiple cloud environments, and instinctively I think this is the best fit for Cortexia. In this role, they are also good at explaining that F5 is more of a security company than is often thought.’
‘Last but not least, there is also a strong click with the people at Cortexia on a personal level. F5 is usually very selective when it comes to partnerships, so they should take that as a compliment.’
