Netskope’s unique partner strategy to growth in Asia Pacific

“We're not trying to paint everybody with the same broad brush, go to market and try to convert everyone to sell. It's a very focused approach. So, in that sense, partners like engaging with us because they know there is less competition,” says Kunal Jha, Regional Director for Netskope Asia.

For Netskope, the partner ecosystem is critical for growth in the Asia Pacific region. With businesses preferring platformized solutions and also looking to consolidate their cybersecurity tools, partners are key in enabling this.

Netskope has also been consistently recognized over the past decade for its leadership in unified data protection and has been recognized by IDC as a leader in the 2025 IDC MarketScape for DLP.

To understand more about Netskope’s partner ecosystem in the region, CRN Asia speaks to Kunal Jha, Regional Director for Netskope Asia.

Can you tell us a bit more about Netskope’s channel plans in Asia Pacific?

In the Asia Pacific region, the percentage of business that goes through the channel is 100%. We are 100% channel driven. We do not do direct business with our customers.

As a mid-sized company, we are what about 2,500 plus employees globally growing rapidly. But we're never going to hold a candle to some of the larger competitors who may outnumber us one to 10 on the field.

In that sense, the channel plays a huge role in augmenting our presence, increasing our reach and helping us with the customer relationships that they've had for decades. They’ve been the trusted advisor for certain large customers and have seen the technological evolution over the last 15 years.

The channel partners were the ones who sold the first VPN. Then, they were the ones who sold the first secure web gateway. They were also the ones who sold the first DLP solution. And they are the ones that are being called back in for transformation.

So, partners are absolutely central to the strategy. I would say that wherever possible, depending on the project size and complexity, Netskope sales, pre-sales, professional services will engage directly to solve problems, demonstrate capability, take accountability, put our skin in the game directly and not leave everything on the partner's shoulders, but absolutely transact through the partner. We continue growing our presence through the channel ecosystem.

What partners are hoping to see more from Netskope?

One thing we hear very often from partners is that Netskope is a great technology company. So, why don't you spend more money on advertising and visibility? So obviously, we work with the principle that less is more. We let our solution do the talking, but we show up where it matters in terms of visibility.

You'll see us at the industry events that really matter. What they're also asking is more enablement, more labs, centers of excellence, so that they can easily do bake-offs between competitors. But also, what they're saying is references, learnings from some of the global wins that we have.

Since we started in the US, that's still a big percentage of our overall revenue, which provides a lot of best practice sharing, where organizations within ASEAN can benefit. So, it's a mixed bag.

I would say as resellers who run their own business, their primary intention is to service their customers to 100% satisfaction and make money to remain profitable. They like to engage with us because we haven't spread our channel presence so much that there are 10 partners in every deal. We're still the right size in terms of company that we will limit ourselves to a set of focus partners.

We're not trying to paint everybody with the same broad brush, go to market and trying to convert everyone to sell. It's a very focused approach. So, in that sense, partners like engaging with us because they know there is less competition.

So, if it's a ‘Let's Go’ deal, they won't be up against five others who are also trying to sell ‘Let's Go’ in a race to the bottom. And of course, they're asking for more skills, more certifications, easier access to ‘Let's Go’ certified professions.

How different are the partners in the APAC region?

So, the way APAC is split at the moment for Netskope is the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) region, India, Japan and then the rest of Asia, which is all of ASEAN plus Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea.

I'd say the region that is under my care is probably the most complex because every country has its own set of preferences, own set of resellers, system integrators, their own cultural nuances. So, there's no one size fits all strategy that you can ever deploy in this region versus what you can do in probably India or Australia.

Because essentially, they are one country. So, we're approaching this region in a more nuanced manner. It's a countrywide strategy. We obviously started with Singapore. We've done very well in the Philippines. And in the last 18 months, we've put people on the ground in Thailand, in Korea, very recently in Taiwan as well, and we'll continue growing.

What drives conversations with partners in the region?

In most cases, our interactions with partners are driven by customer demand. So, a lot of the time, customers have looked at the Gartner Magic Quadrant and they've seen that we're the leaders for three years running. They'll end up contacting Netskope but will ask for a local partner representative.

In that sense, we will then begin to ask who their preferred resellers and system integrators are. And then our channel team gets activated to try and build that bridge. Now, building the bridge may be as easy as just signing a reseller contract, but it's not that simple.

You need to train, enable their teams, help them understand the technology. We will evaluate whether they have people who've worked on similar tech before. In that sense, onboarding is a lot easier.

However, if the partners are resellers of ERP vendors for example, they have no idea what cybersecurity is. They may not be the right fit for us, but it's generally driven by customer demand.

And success breeds success. The moment we land one project with one partner; it then becomes a more strategic relationship. It looks like there's money to be had because they understand that there's a follow the money strategy.

In conversations with customers, I'm hearing these keywords often in our discussions, “whether it's zero trust, whether it's data leakage, whether it's remote access, can Netskope solve some of these problems?” And that's how our presence grows.

We have ASEAN-wide partnerships with large partners like Ensign InfoSecurity, British Telecom, Orange CyberDefence, Telstra and such. These are global and regional partners with a multi-country presence. It's easier for us to scale with them. But like I said, this is a very fragmented region. So, there'll be specialist partners within each country that we'll have to pick and choose who to engage with.

At the same time, we try not to spread the pie amongst too many people. So, it has to remain a profitable and a slightly exclusive strategy. But at the same time, they have to be among the top five resellers in the country.

Given this partner strategy, what are your plans for 2025 and beyond?

I think the best way to describe the inflection point at which we are right now this year, and probably the next will be the year of explosive growth for the region I am running currently.

Asia-Pacific and Japan overall has been growing at a very healthy pace already, and it's among the fastest in the world for Netskope. India, ANZ are larger markets just by revenue and by technology maturity. But a good lion's share of the growth will come from this region.

So, we will continue growing in terms of people on the ground, customer facing personnel, support personnel, including customer success, technical success, technical support over the phone and other functions, including solution architecture that help ensure that we can scale with the level of demand we're seeing.

Oftentimes, you may come into the discussion as a challenger vendor. You may have the best product, but if you don't have people to support the discussion, whether it's architectural or transformational, you will not be trusted.

And then another important point here is Netskope NewEdge, our global network of point of presence (POPs) or data centers because Netskope is a cloud-based solution. Therefore, all our processing happens in the cloud, which is a private cloud. Netskope is among the only vendors in the industry who built a private network of POPs globally.

This private network gives us greater control over end-to-end latency and helps us provide better SLAs to our customers. In that sense, there will be more data centers also that can get added because this is a living thing. It keeps growing. The whole idea of secure access service edge is that the edge must be as close to the user as possible.

So, if you are in Singapore, your traffic should not go for inspection to Sydney or to the US. It should get processed locally. And in that sense, there will be more investment that will come into that area as well.

This probably also answers the concern that companies have when it comes to meeting data regulatory and sovereignty requirements, right?

Absolutely. Data sovereignty often becomes an important discussion. Where will the data get processed? Where will my tenant and my user information sit? Where is your management plane? These questions come up quite often.

We are continuing to ensure that we address it for as many countries as possible. I reckon we will have among the best coverage for this region compared to any other competitor. And that is a big differentiator as well.

Also, just saying that I have a local data center doesn't really cut it. Because sometimes what happens is, SSE is built up of a stack of services. So, when I say secure web gateway, I'm looking at web traffic only. When I say ZTNA, I'm looking at private application traffic only. So, there may be situations where you say I have a local data center, but only for SWIG traffic. SWG traffic goes here. The moment it's ZTNA traffic, then I have to use the Manila POP, or I have to use the Tokyo POP. That is inherently a waste of time because then it's not a full compute POP.

Netskope has again stayed true to that promise. Whenever we build a point of presence, it is full stack. All services are offered from all POPs globally and that continues to grow as well. It allays data sovereignty concerns, end user experience concerns around latency and in some cases, it also ends up saving customers international internet transit costs.