Tricentis’ partner ecosystem explained

Damien Wong, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) stated that while Tricentis does not work 100% through partners, his desired end state is that every customer should have partners that work with them.

While AI-generated code definitely boosts productivity among developers, there are still many challenges companies are facing when using AI-generated code. With potential security flaws being one of the biggest concerns on AI-generated code, it is imperative that organizations run continuous testing and quality engineering of AI-generated code.

According to Tricentis’ 2025 Quality Transformation Report, 74% of Singapore organizations believe poor software quality costs them between US$500,000 and US$5 million or more annually. Organizations in the manufacturing industry suffer the highest costs, with more than a third (39%) paying upwards of $1 million per year due to poor software quality.

While Tricentis is capable of helping organizations deal with these challenges, the vendor relies heavily on its partner ecosystem in the region to ensure they are capable of having the best reach to customers.

In fact, Damien Wong, Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific and Japan (JAPAC) stated that while Tricentis does not work 100% through partners, his desired end state is that every customer should have partners that work with them.

“The reason for this is we're a technology company. We're a software company. Software is not a solution. Software is a necessary component to a solution. But a solution can only be made real by different stakeholders. The partners play a big part in doing that. They translate the business problem through this technology, and how this technology is applied to solve that problem,” explained Wong.

Acknowledging that some specific customers who have some constraints would work directly with Tricentis, Wong added that eventually their aim is to bring partners to help them in the long term.

“We do not want to provide corresponding services to these customers. The only way we can help them is not only to bring our software, but we also have to bring our professional services. We're not a services company. We're a software company. So short term, okay. Long term, we always want to bring somebody else in who can help them in the longer run. The partners have the capabilities to give the whole package,” said Wong.

Types of partners

Looking at the type of partners that Tricentis works with, Wong pointed out that they have different types of partners which include technology partners and OEM partners.

“An example of a good OEM partner is SAP. SAP uses our technologies, and they position this to their own customers because it's very synergistic. For example, in an SAP transformation, you are transforming your traditional ERP systems into a much more modern, more agile version of the ERP that they bring, then it's highly risky. Because you're taking mission-critical business processes, which oftentimes are heavily customized systems because of the legacy architectures and trying to bring them into a more modern way that these systems run,” explained Wong.

“In SAP's context, this is what they call a clean core approach, meaning that don't customize the core engine, use the surrounding capabilities to implement those specific business processes that you want. They're trying to take these traditionally heavily customized systems and bring them into a more modern architecture. But these modern architectures tend to change very frequently because if you make it easy to change and more agile, then you start to change them a lot more because you can then respond to market needs a lot more quickly,” he said.

“You can change the regulatory requirements more quickly. You don't have to make changes to a heavily brittle application. You can do it in terms of customizing things that do not impact the core much more easily. And that's where the agility comes in, but in so doing, there is also the need to test it more frequently, right?” said Wong.

“And let's face it, when you test, you don't just test within your system. Why? Your system does not just sit on its own. No system is an island today. It touches a front-end system, it touches a back-end system. So there's so many integrations that touch onto your core, for example, the ERP system. So you can't just say that, hey, I'm going to test only if there's a change, I'm only testing this bit here. When you change this bit, there's a possibility that impacts upstream and downstream, and things break,” added Wong.

As such, this is why testing becomes such an important thing. For Wong, testing can no longer be done manually. It has to be done in an automated and intelligent way.

An ecosystem of partners

Apart from working with OEM partners, Wong highlighted that Tricentis also works with their extended partner ecosystem, the systems integrators, and such.

“We have to then ensure that they are enabled, that they are aware of what are the considerations, because their core will probably be more of the enterprise systems, not so much on testing and testing methodology. So, we do spend a lot of time helping enable a lot of these systems integrators. We work with value-added resellers (VARs) as well. VARs tend to be a bit more focused on our domain. They will have a horizontal view of how best practices are in testing, testing methodologies, how you automate these capabilities, and such,” he added.

In Singapore, one partner that Tricentis works with is Brillar. Wong said that Tricentis started working with Brillar in Singapore but eventually expanded across Southeast Asia with them. Another partner is a VAR called TTC. A company from New Zealand, Wong said that Tricentis works with them globally and is their largest VAR in the US.

“So, I think this is great because OEMs, SIs and VARs are the key partners that we tend to work with. And of course we work with managed service providers as well. Sometimes a company will also provide a managed service for testing. We do work with them to ensure that they have the capabilities in-house to try this,” said Wong.

Partner enablement in APAC

According to Wong, Tricentis has dedicated partner managers in the region that are capable of providing sales and technical enablement.

“We have a team of partner growth and selection managers (PGMs) that help them build these competencies. The partner managers are there to identify, recruit, manage, and grow those partners that we focus on. We're fairly selective in the partners that we work with because we don't have unlimited resources,” said Wong.

Wong also mentioned that these partner managers, in conjunction with the rest of the sales organization, will identify who is the type of partner that Tricentis wants to work with and then just ensure that those relationships are built with them. This includes signing them up, doing joint go-to-market activities with them alike, joint demand generation and marketing, and then ensuring that in connection with PGMs, schedule the right levels of training to get the certifications needed for them to do their jobs and so on.

“So, partner managers are more holistic in terms of the fact that they identify, recruit and manage those partners. And then PGMs are more in terms of dedicated enablement teams. Partners can go onto the partner portal with their authorized partner. They can get access to not-for-resale licenses, so they can do their sales activities, they can do their training activities, POCs and so on,” said Wong.

Wong also mentioned that partners will have access to market development funds and can do joint marketing together with Tricentis.

“As part of this, we provide our authorized partners with free training, free enablement and certifications as well. So, it's actually not a bad thing for them to come on board, plus the fact that it's a huge market that they are going after. The estimates are about US$50 billion in 2025 for the software testing market. And our experience has been that for every dollar of software revenue that we get, our partners typically get US$5 to US$10 of relevant or corresponding services. So to them, of course reselling the software is a source of value and revenue to them, but the bulk of the revenue comes from associated services. Whether it's to stand it up, train them or actually utilise the software to help those customers get value,” said Wong.

Challenges with partners

While partners are critical to Tricentis in APAC, Wong also believes that partners need to be enabled and certified, especially when it comes to dealing with customers.

“It's very important. Because there are many people who claim to be our partners and claim to have skills and competencies, which sometimes is troubling, because we need to have the ability to say that these are certified partners of ours, because they've gone through all the training and certification on an ongoing basis,” explained Wong.

As technology is evolving rapidly, Wong also pointed out that with new capabilities being launched yearly, partners need to be well informed.

“We just announced the launch of our AI workspace, which is going to be generally available in 2026. It effectively is going to be the workspace for you to orchestrate, not only Tricentis agents, but also our partner with inter-party agents, so that they can do different things for and on your behalf. It's a new product,” said Wong.

“Our partners need to be also made aware, trained and enabled. How can this be used in their client environments? So, we need to continue doing that. The reason why I say this is because I've had even certified partners where even their people, maybe because they're large organizations, some of their own people are not trained, not certified, and yet they are set loose in their client environments. We've got mixed feedback that comes back from the client saying services was sub-optimal. So that's where we have to double-click and say, the people that were assigned to you were from a different team, and they were not certified and trained. So, this is where we need to continue to do that,” added Wong.

As such, this is where Wong believes that training and enablement actually help to address these challenges. It’s also why Tricentis is very focused on helping ensure partners are well-trained, well-certified, and that they understand that as the portfolio evolves, they have to continuously invest in training.

“When I say invest, it's not dollars with us, but it's more their time and effort and ensuring that people are aware of this and be able to support our customers,” concluded Wong.