Zscaler’s partner ecosystem in APAC explained

Foad Farrokhnia Head of Channel & Alliances, Asia Pacific & Japan, Zscaler breaks down the partner ecosystem in APAC and explains how the vendor is working with partners at different levels to help customers in their digital transformation journey.

Zscaler continues to experience significant growth in the APAC region thanks to its strong partner ecosystem in the region. Following the completion of the Red Canary acquisition in August this year, both companies are now focused on delivering unified security operations, combining sophisticated exposure management with agentic AI-driven threat management.

The cloud security leader also announced a revenue of US$719.2 million, representing a 21% increase year on year. The increased revenue followed by the acquisition has now enabled the vendor to focus on providing more solutions and services to its customers around the world.

In APAC, Zscaler is focused on security digital transformation for customers by doing it in a way that builds confidence for customers, so they will continue to innovate, grow and transform together. Enabling this success is Zscaler’s partner ecosystem in the region.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Foad Farrokhnia Head of Channel & Alliances, Asia Pacific & Japan, Zscaler said Zscaler is ultimately one team with their partners and that’s how they’re able to deliver on their purpose of delivering customer outcomes.

Can you tell us a bit more about Zscaler’s partner ecosystem in APAC?

APAC is an exciting region. It's very dynamic and diverse. We're navigating different requirements, demands, languages, cultures, and so those expectations are also quite varied and dynamic from customers. Our relationship with partners is actually very much a special one in the sense that it's connected to the regions that we are going and speaking to customers in.

For me, in APAC its about working with the right partners with the right strengths, differentiations and ability to execute an outcome for a customer. This has to be appropriate for India or Australia or even Japan. These markets have very different kind of dynamics and so those nuances are super important for us. To be able to work through partners is super critical because as Zscaler we're never going to be able to have that sort of scale to be able to actually you know adapt to those different dynamics.

So then when I think about partners and how they help us deliver on that customer transformation outcome, considering those nuances, we're also really working across a number of different routes to market with these partners.

If its about transformation and building those Zscaler zero trust practices around architecture, it's the GSIs. We're really activating quite strongly with some of those GSIs which are folks like EY, Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, etc. These are the folks that are really kind of helping us in that space. We're also activating their consulting advisory services which again help us quite considerably in ensuring that the conversation around zero trust is at the right level because this is now really a board level conversation.

When I think about implementation and post sales, the MSSPs are super critical for us. We've generally worked with a lot of these service providers like Telstra in Australia, Singtel in Singapore, Tata Communications in India, NTT DOCOMO in Japan, and really kind of working closely with these folks to build that MSSP capability. We make sure that they have credibility in how they deliver and support customers in those regions. They're super critical to us in how we ensure adoption of our platform and then again going back to the purpose of delivering secure digital transformation for customers.

As Zscaler, we're able to actually track back and ensure year-on-year that we're delivering on our promise with customers working through these MSSPs and implementation partners.

In emerging markets like Sri Lanka and Bangladesh or New Zealand in our ANZ space, we're looking for scale and so distribution becomes very important.

So we work with folks like Westcon-Compstor in Greater Asia. In Australia, we work with Tech Data as well as in India. What's been really incredible to watch actually is these distribution partners are also really leaned in and have started to transform their own business from potentially what they were doing in the past around more on-prem hardware type business to effectively what Zscaler is, which is a fully cloud native SaaS solution for customers.

In order to do that, they've built their own capability to be able to support partners to deliver again the transformation outcomes for our customers, especially in areas where it is more emerging for us or growth where we don't have all of the resources on the ground to do that.

We're also working with AWS, Microsoft, and Google very closely. What we're trying to activate here is partners who can help us transact or use the cloud marketplace as a contracting vehicle to support our customers and we're seeing this demand grow from the customer side.

We think it's a trend that's going to continue to grow and so we're helping our partners on that journey to become CPPO ready so that they can take that route to market as well or if a customer requires it in order to be able to transact.

Importantly though, as we think about marketplace and the role hyperscaler plays, a really key use case for us is this migration to cloud. As customers look to transform and migrate to cloud with hyperscalers like AWS and the likes, we can play a pivotal role with partners who are effectively migration partners working with these hyperscalers to ensure that migration strategy is secure.

Can you tell us a bit more about partner enablement? Is Zscaler also looking to grow its partner ecosystem in APAC?

So, enablement and the ability to build skills around the Zscaler solution is critical because we're effectively helping customers through a mindset shift. So, it's not a point sell. It's actually to come and look at your architecture in a completely different way.

And it's not just the technology outcome. There's a lot of business outcomes that we want to be able to position and differentiate as we do that. So, the customer wants to be facing a partner who really knows what they're talking about, because they have to put their faith and confidence in that leadership that they’re receiving from this effectively trusted advisor. So that’s the overarching theme around why we want to partner with purpose, partner with impact, and make sure that we invest in enablement.

On partner enablement, considering we have such a diverse market over here and so many different routes to market. One of the key things we want to ensure we had was coverage in terms of Zscaler folks who are partner engineers, partner enablement folks who can sit down and face into our most strategic partners to ensure that acceleration of enablement is on track. We've invested in Zscaler folks sitting in the various geographies that can actually drive this forward.

Next, we are doubling down on partners that we believe also want to lean into this. So we have a large set of partners, but we have actually doubled down on a more strategic set of partners where we are seeing them investing and leaning in. So, for that kind of set of partners, we're providing customized, tailored kind of enablement and training programs to make sure that they can actually continue to accelerate on where their strength, where their strengths sit and kind of take them forward from there. So that's more around kind of custom play, but more at volume. And more broadly speaking, we have an abundance of online assets now available to all of our partners who have onboarded.

There's the opportunity for them to train and certify through that online platform as well in our partner program platform. We then have an advanced next step of those initial online training and certifications, which includes things like specialization. And as you become specialized in some of our solutions, whether it's CIA, ZPA, now we have data protection in there.

We have our Zero Trust branch capability coming online as well. As you start to actually get these specializations, you also receive badges, acknowledgement and recognition around that specialization. And more work, more projects and more assignments will start to float to you because we feel confident that you have that skill set and can actually go and drive those conversations.

The next level of that is more kind of at a partner company level, which is a number of folks now trained in basic certs or a bunch of folks now specialized in some of our specialized products. These partners now want to do implementation and become delivery services partners. And so, we have a fully comprehensive program that trains, certifies, and assesses to make sure that the skill sets are there.

These partners are badged as DSA; deployment services authorized. And then those partners have right of refusal on services when it comes to a particular deployment or an engagement that they've had on an account which they've closed.

We have then managed services authorization. So if you've got your certs around the basic product set, you've got your specializations; you've now got your implementation or deployment ready authorization. You then have the opportunity to move to MSSP authorization as well.

And again, that's another set of comprehensive training, certification, evaluation, assessments to make sure that you've got all of the skill sets you need. And at that point, you can be authorized at a partner level to deliver managed services across our ASCII Scala crisis solutions as well.

What's important in all of these is that as partners invest in these things and they grow their skill sets around these areas; we also see them become more profitable in selling Zscaler products.

They deliver better outcomes from a customer outcomes perspective, which means they now have better adoption of the Zscaler platform, which opens upsell, cross-sell opportunities. And for those partners that build a zero-trust practice, and I'm very specific around this, we're trying to deliver a secure digital transformation for a customer.

It doesn't mean we're just trying to sell Zscaler. That's not the end result here. It's a digital transformation for a customer that's secure. And that for us is really implementing a zero-trust strategy in your approach.

And so, what I really encourage my partners to do is build the strengths around Zscaler, also understand what is your zero trust approach from a technology standpoint, and start to stitch those things together, those technologies together, so that you've got a really integrated approach around how you actually deliver a long term strategy around zero trust.

And so, this brings me now to our technology alliance partners that we have out there as well. We work very closely with CrowdStrike. We've got strategic partnerships with AWS, with Microsoft. On the identity side, we work closely with Rubrik from a resilience standpoint. And so once you actually start to realize the number of deep integrations we've got across these very well-known zero trust technologies, as a partner, the smartest thing to do is build an architecture leveraging these technologies, and start to actually consult, advise, and lead speaking to a customer to be able to deliver that transformation for them.