Infoblox partners will play a crucial role in the company’s next phase of transformation, dubbed Infoblox 3.0.

That’s according to Jesper Andersen, Infoblox’s president and CEO. He unveiled the company’s next phase during Tuesday’s Infoblox Americas Virtual Partner Summit.

Infoblox’s first phase involved becoming a public company and establishing leadership in DDI, Andersen said. The second phase then involved going private under the ownership of Vista Equity Partners. It also moved from selling perpetual licenses with attached maintenance to increasingly selling subscription services.

Last fall, Vista Equity Partners sold one-half of Infoblox to Warburg Pincus, a global private equity firm. That’s prompted more investment in innovation and growth, Andersen said.

It also prompted a McKinsey study of Infoblox’s market opportunities in both core DDI and security infrastructure services.

Infoblox’s Jesper Andersen

“I think of Infoblox 3.0 as this next phase … think three, four years out into the future,” Andersen said. “This is really the result of what came out of that McKinsey study.”

Big Opportunity in Cloud-Native Edge Services

Infoblox competes in three different categories: core network services, foundational security services and cloud-native edge services, Andersen said. The BloxOne platform is giving Infoblox and its partners opportunities in cloud-native edge services.

“McKinsey says that market in 2019 … was $3.5 billion and their assessment is that growing to $5.7 billion in 2024,” he said. “That would be an aggregate compound annual growth rate of 11%. I actually think it’s at least a few percentage points higher.”

Infoblox 3.0 means making networking and security simpler, and being more proactive than reactive with customers, Andersen said. It’s also less about managing customers and more about creating value for them, moving faster for customers, and making more informed decisions. In addition, there’s more M&A in Infoblox’s future.

“In Infoblox 3.0, if anything we are doubling down on our commitment to our channel, to you as partners,” he said. “There’s a lot of discussion in our industry around how, in a SaaS world, because we see what customers do and because of automation making things simpler, that maybe we didn’t need our partners. That is not how I see the world. I think we need our partners more than ever, and I think our partners need you as well.”

So what does Infoblox 3.0 mean for partners? Scroll through our slideshow above for more details.