APJ and ANZ CyberArk channel leads on Palo Alto acquisition, their ‘win-win’ strategy and leveraging disties

Jeremy Sim and Peter Jose the new APJ and ANZ head of channels have had a whirlwind start to their tenures at the identity company.

In less than six months, CyberArk has appointed two new channel leads for the APJ and ANZ regions, plus news emerged recently that the identity company was going to be acquired by cybersecurity giant Palo Alto.

Jeremy Sim, area VP, channels APJ and Peter Jose, head of channels, partners and alliances ANZ at CyberArk spoke to CRN Australia about the recent acquisition news, plans for their respective regions and why they want to leverage their distributors.

A few weeks ago, cybersecurity giant Palo Alto announced it would acquire CyberArk for US$25 billion, making it one of the biggest deals in the cyber sector.

Commenting on the acquisition news, Sim said both him and Jose were surprised at the news.

"Recently, partners have come up to share with a bit of comments and feedback. I was saying to the team, we don't have the crystal ball,” he explained.

CyberArk is a partner-based organisation, with more than 90 percent of its business globally done through partners.

“The partners play a very big part in our business. The partners are part of that success, they grew with us, especially in APJ,” Sim explained.

“Where if you can imagine any software that comes into Asia Pacific you have your own internal team, but the fastest way to grow is through the channels, and that's how we've been able to progress in the last couple of years.”

“Win-win” strategy

Sim explained their strategy from a channel perspective which he puts it as a “win-win” approach.

“We're committed to our partners as well. We want to have a win-win strategy with our partners to make sure that they are profitable,” he explained.

“Because if they're making money, we are as well.”

Sim said he wants to be able to enable them, to increase the capability.

“We do see a strong play with our channels and across all the regions they do, they do see a vision with us to grow.”

Sim wants to make the channels CyberArk is in as “strong as it can be”.

“It is not broken, but it's not perfect, where we are right now,” he explained.

"We want to drive channels to be a force multi line in terms of sales, which means that we need them to be self sufficient. There's a lot of things that we need to change.”

One thing he wants is to have all channels find it easy to deal with CyberArk.

“I don't want channels to be coming to me all the time asking for discounts, go out there to the customers and get more. Get more from them and from the budget itself,” he explained.

“So regardless of the acquisition, it's very important that we can grow the partner to that position itself, and allow our partners to be more efficient, more effective in the field because that's the most important thing.”

ANZ strategy

Jose explained what he wants to see more specifically in the ANZ market. First and foremost, coverage is one of the things that CyberArk is conscious of aligning their go-to-market team around and leveraging the partners.

“Some of the territories, across Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia, we are very much partner led territories where we work in collaboration with those partners to extend our reach, and our partners are very much an extension of our team,” he said.

“We're really working in lockstep with our go to market team, and we're leading those territories if you will.”

Secondly, Jose explained is the concept around raising standards and providing operational support.

“We want to work towards both those business plans, as well as a shared scorecard to measure how we're tracking together. That really comes into the governance and cadence with the different partners,” he explained.

CyberArk has a number of niche, smaller partners, which do need a little bit more hand holding, but are less geared around governance models, Jose said.

“But with our larger partners, it's how do we run QBRs, how do we actually work towards a set of outcomes over not just a 12 month period, but over a two to three year horizon? How are we building up their business? How are they working into the various industries?” He explained.

This leads into the industry play of where CyberArk wants to be deployed, whether its federal or state government, higher education or healthcare.

“We're working with a select group of partners to start to support our go-to-market team, because we've recently made some investments in some of our leadership in that space,” Jose said.

“We're applying new hires into that area, and as a channel, we really need to support them, both from an IRAP perspective, but also just as a general investment perspective.”

He added, "We have some fantastic government departments that do use a lot of our technology to safeguard citizens and employees.

“But we're looking at, how do we expand and do a better job there of penetrating into those specific areas that have all the same security concerns, all of the corporate customers have as well.”

Leveraging disties

Another part of their strategy is leveraging distributors, Sim said working with disties “enhances” the entire ecosystem because they are the channel that is running within themselves.

"Having one partner is one partner, but if I have one distie I could have 20 partners, so it expands the reach that we have in the market,” he said.

“At the same time, we do want happy customers. It's not just about the sale, what the distie brings with them as well is also technical support, sales support, and that encapsulates what we want in a happy customer.”

CyberArk has a C.A.R.E methodology, C is close, A is adoption, R is renewal and E is expansion.

“A lot of times we look at the C we close the deal and we're pretty happy we move on. But once you have a distie you can have that cycle ongoing,” Sim ended.