As shorter certificate lifecycles, Artificial Intelligence and post-quantum cryptography reshape the digital trust market, channel partners face an opportunity to move beyond transactional certificate sales. Sean Remnant, Chief Strategy Officer at Ignition Technology, and Paul Holt, Group Vice President, EMEA at DigiCert, explain how greater automation, specialist expertise and managed services can help partners build recurring revenue while guiding customers through growing complexity.
Digital trust is rapidly becoming a much bigger channel conversation.
The proliferation of machine identities and AI agents, shorter certificate lifecycles and the approaching transition to post-quantum cryptography are creating challenges that extend far beyond the traditional management of digital certificates. For channel partners, that change is opening opportunities to provide the expertise, automation and services customers need to manage increasingly complex environments.
DigiCert’s appointment of Ignition Technology as a strategic distribution partner across the UK and Ireland, DACH, France, Benelux and the Nordics is intended to capitalise on that opportunity. The agreement gives partners access to DigiCert ONE, which brings together public key infrastructure (PKI), Domain Name System (DNS) and certificate lifecycle management.
Sean Remnant, Chief Strategy Officer at Ignition Technology, believes the timing is particularly significant for partners.
“It opens up one of the fastest-growing areas of the security market for our partners, at exactly the right moment.”
He argues that digital trust has evolved from a largely technical certificate-management function into an issue attracting attention at board level, driven by the growth of machine and AI identities, shorter certificate lifecycles and preparations for post-quantum cryptography.
For partners, that creates an opportunity to develop higher-value propositions rather than compete around commodity certificate sales.
“For partners, that means new conversations with existing customers, a route into automation and managed services, and a recurring-revenue engine in a category where demand is only accelerating.”
Complexity drives consolidation
One of the biggest factors shaping the market is the growing difficulty organisations face managing digital trust across increasingly distributed environments.
Remnant believes the traditional point-solution approach is becoming unsustainable.
“Because the problem has outgrown the point-solution model.”
Certificates that might once have been managed manually now exist across sprawling estates of applications, devices, software and machine identities. At the same time, certificate lifetimes are shortening and organisations need to prepare their cryptographic environments for the post-quantum era.
Attempting to manage those challenges through disconnected technologies can increase complexity and create visibility gaps.
“What organisations actually want is confidence, one place to discover, automate and govern trust across their whole estate, from devices and software to AI content and agents.”
Paul Holt, Group Vice President, EMEA at DigiCert, also sees visibility as fundamental.
DigiCert’s PKI modernisation research found that only 34% of organisations have a complete and current view of their digital certificates.
“You cannot secure what you cannot see.”
Holt believes bringing visibility, policy and automation together can help organisations address that problem at scale.
“That shows why modernising digital trust is about more than security. It is also about resilience, efficiency and freeing teams from manual processes.”
Building expertise for the post-quantum era
While technology is evolving rapidly, both Remnant and Holt believe specialist channel expertise will be critical to helping customers understand what the changes mean for their businesses.
Remnant sees enablement as one of the areas where specialist distribution can provide the greatest value.
“Enablement is where a specialist distributor earns its place and it’s where we invest most.”
Partners are increasingly being asked about relatively new disciplines, including securing non-human and AI-agent identities and developing the crypto-agility required for eventual post-quantum migration. Remnant acknowledges that many partners do not currently possess all of that expertise internally.
“Most partners don’t yet have that expertise in-house, and they don’t need to build it alone.”
Ignition Technology plans to support partners through technical training, accreditation, hands-on labs, proof-of-concept assistance and access to specialist pre-sales engineers.
However, Remnant argues that technical knowledge represents only part of the challenge. Partners must also be able to translate complicated subjects such as quantum readiness into customer propositions with clearly defined commercial value.
“The goal is to take partners from awareness to competence to confident, repeatable selling, so they can lead these conversations rather than react to them.”
Holt similarly believes channel expertise will become increasingly valuable as several significant technology changes converge.
“Enterprises are facing a convergence of challenges. Certificate lifecycles are moving towards 47 days, the clock is ticking on post quantum migration, and AI is creating a new wave of identities and potential threats.”
Rather than expecting customers to navigate those changes independently, partners can help them understand their existing environments, identify risks and determine which areas require attention first.
“Our job is to give the channel the technology, knowledge and support to turn that complexity into a practical roadmap,” said Holt.
From certificate sales to recurring services
The transition also creates an opportunity for partners to rethink how they make money from digital trust.
Remnant believes managed services and automation can shift the channel away from transactional certificate sales towards longer-term customer relationships.
One of Ignition Technology’s priorities over the next 12 months will therefore be helping partners build services around DigiCert ONE.
Remnant described this as: “Services and recurring revenue, helping partners move beyond transactional certificate sales into automation and managed digital-trust services, which is better for them commercially and stickier with their customers.”
The distributor will initially concentrate on recruiting and activating partners across the launch markets while developing expertise around shorter certificate lifecycles, AI and machine identities and post-quantum migration.
Ignition Technology’s existing partner model includes sales and product training, pre-sales services, lead-generation support and implementation assistance.
For DigiCert, the relationship forms part of a wider partner-first strategy across EMEA.
“We are taking a partner first approach across EMEA because partners bring expertise, customer relationships and local market knowledge that add real value around our technology,” Holt said.
Ignition Technology’s cybersecurity expertise and established regional ecosystem were important factors in its selection.
“This matters because customers are navigating several major shifts at once, from shorter certificate lifecycles and post quantum readiness to the rapid growth of AI. They need expertise as well as technology, and that is where the channel can make a real difference,” said Holt.
Convergence creates the opportunity
Looking further ahead, Holt expects convergence to become the defining characteristic of the digital trust market.
“The defining issue will be convergence. Shorter certificate lifecycles, post quantum migration and the AI boom are all arriving at the same time.”
Despite appearing to be separate technology challenges, Holt believes they share a fundamental requirement: organisations need to understand what exists within their environments, what can be trusted and where risks reside.
That will increasingly turn digital trust into a strategic enterprise concern rather than a narrowly defined security function.
“It also makes partner expertise increasingly valuable. Customers will need partners that can bring together technology, expertise and services to help them navigate these changes with confidence,” said Holt.
For channel partners, the opportunity therefore extends considerably further than distributing certificates. As organisations attempt to manage growing populations of machine and AI identities while automating certificate management and preparing their cryptography for the future, they will need expertise capable of turning those individual challenges into a coherent digital trust strategy.
Partners that develop that expertise have an opportunity not only to address an emerging customer requirement but to build differentiated services and recurring revenue around it. For DigiCert and Ignition Technology, that transition from transactional certificate sales towards strategic digital trust services is where the next phase of channel growth could lie.
