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Pulse Secure: Growing and protecting revenue with Google Cloud Platform Marketplace

To give its customers the fastest time to value on Google Cloud Platform, Pulse Secure makes its solutions available via GCP Marketplace.

Pulse Secure

Based in San Jose, California, Pulse Secure is a Google Technology Partner providing secure access and application delivery solutions to enterprises and service providers.

Features used
Docs
Google Meet

To give its customers the fastest time to value on Google Cloud Platform, Pulse Secure makes its solutions available via GCP Marketplace.

Google Workspace Results

13 product SKUs on GCP Marketplace

• Generates more revenue per customer than other cloud marketplaces

• Protects growing cloud revenue stream by maintaining a stable customer base

• Encourages and accelerates adoption of Pulse Secure products in the cloud

As more businesses move their infrastructures to public cloud, software companies face both an opportunity and a challenge: On the one hand, if they can make it easy for customers to deploy and run their applications in the cloud, they can tap into a new and growing revenue stream. However, cloud migrations can also prompt many customers to abandon their previous solutions for other tools that integrate better with their new cloud stack.

Pulse Secure, which recently acquired the virtual Application Delivery Controller business of Brocade Communications (now Broadcom), is seeing an increasingly larger percentage of its revenue coming from cloud deployments. Although part of the shift is organic, much of it is due to Pulse Secure's partnerships with cloud service providers, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Many customers launch Pulse Secure's application delivery, virtual private network, network access control, and mobile security products via cloud marketplaces, giving them a fast and easy way to deploy the software in the cloud.

Generating more revenue per customer

"We noticed immediately that Google Cloud Platform customers tend to be more sophisticated, enterprise companies that choose our higher-priced SKUs. They are concerned about global application availability, so they are interested in our more advanced features. That generates more revenue per customer compared to other cloud marketplaces." - Nick Vale, Sales and Business Development Manager, Pulse Secure

For businesses already running website and application workloads on GCP — including many of Pulse Secure's large enterprise customers — the ability to deploy and manage production-grade secure access solutions in just a few clicks is compelling. To allow these prospective customers to get started quickly, Pulse Secure makes 13 of its product SKUs available in GCP Marketplace. The solutions include hourly billing options for customers that need to scale on demand to match varying workloads. Usage fees appear on customers' GCP invoices as a separate line item.

"We noticed immediately that Google Cloud Platform customers tend to be more sophisticated, enterprise companies that choose our higher-priced SKUs," says Nick Vale, Sales and Business Development Manager at Pulse Secure. "They are concerned about global application availability, so they are interested in our more advanced features. That generates more revenue per customer compared to other cloud marketplaces."

Easy to engage, easy to update

It took only a few weeks for Pulse Secure to get started with GCP Marketplace. The company can easily update its software on GCP whenever a new software version is released to market, adding new features and fixes with no action needed from the end customer. Customers use Cloud Deployment Manager to specify the exact resources needed for their application and can launch Pulse Secure products on Compute Engine around 4 times faster than other marketplaces.

"It all comes down to speed, and with GCP Marketplace we can add new products and update code 12 times faster than other cloud marketplaces," says Nick. "It's easy for customers to quickly find and launch our solutions — we have a very attractive shop window on GCP Marketplace."

Protecting a growing revenue stream

"It all comes down to speed, and with GCP Marketplace we can add new products and update code 12 times faster than other cloud marketplaces. It's easy for customers to quickly find and launch our solutions we have a very attractive shop window on GCP Marketplace." - Nick Vale, Sales and Business Development Manager, Pulse Secure

The official brand change from Brocade to Pulse Secure was not finalized until after the company began selling via GCP Marketplace and other cloud marketplaces. When the time came to rebrand the company's cloud products, each of Pulse Secure's marketplace partners had a chance to prove their responsiveness and agility.

Google collaborated with Pulse Secure in real time using Google Workspace tools such as Docs and Google Meet, providing friendly, project-driven change management assistance. As a result, Pulse Secure was able to take a lift-and-shift approach and make the rebrand transparent to GCP customers — unlike some other marketplaces that required the company to delete the Brocade-branded product SKUs and launch new, revised versions under the Pulse Secure brand.

"Google differentiated themselves during our rebranding by being the fastest – by a good margin – of our three cloud marketplaces to get us up and running under the new Pulse Secure banner," says Nick. "That was a critical time. We could have lost customers — we didn't. In fact, we've seen significant growth."

The ability to seamlessly handle rebranding makes all the difference, helping Pulse Secure keep its customer base stable in a fast-changing industry where any company can be acquired tomorrow.

Valuable customer insights

"As our customers move more toward the cloud, it's critical for us to have partners like Google to make deploying our software easy and straightforward. Having our solutions available on GCP Marketplace makes it easy for customers to deploy and grow their usage of Pulse Secure products." - Nick Vale, Sales and Business Development Manager, Pulse Secure

With GCP Marketplace, Pulse Secure can access statistics via a partner portal that includes anonymized data about customer behavior, such as which application tiles they're clicking on, which they actually try to deploy, and if and when they abandon the process.

"We get richer information about customer behavior with GCP Marketplace versus other cloud marketplaces," says Nick. "That helps us convert more people into paying customers because we can see where and how people are dropping out. In those situations, we develop a video or other educational resource to convert more prospects."

Accelerating cloud adoption

Like most software companies, Pulse Secure's product roadmap is moving steadily toward the cloud as its customers embrace cloud services. Making its solutions available on GCP Marketplace encourages and accelerates customer adoption of Pulse Secure's products in the cloud by making them easier to consume.

"As our customers move more toward the cloud, it's critical for us to have partners like Google to make deploying our software easy and straightforward," says Nick. "Having our solutions available on GCP Marketplace makes it easy for customers to deploy and grow their usage of Pulse Secure products."

About GCP Marketplace

GCP Marketplace offers ready-to-go development stacks, solutions, and services to accelerate development, allowing GCP customers to spend less time installing and more time developing.

*Google Workspace was formerly known as G Suite prior to Oct. 6, 2020.