Gigamon CEO on the partner network in APAC

“We never, ever take deals direct to the company. It's not what Gigamon does because we believe that our success is mutually connected to the success of our channel partners as well,” says Shane Buckley, Gigamon CEO.

In 2018, Gigamon put together a huge transformation of its growing market model as a company. The cybersecurity vendor that specializes in deep observability recognized that it was not as proactive in engaging with its channel partners, which it felt were a huge source of customer intimacy, connections, and such.

Realizing that the channel ecosystem represented a community that it absolutely needed to leverage, Gigamon launched its Catalyst program in 2019. The program won quite a number of awards.

Today, no opportunity for Gigamon goes beyond the first stage in their CRM unless there is a channel partner assigned to it. In Asia Pacific, the channel ecosystem contributes to over 50% of Gigamon’s business.

CRN Asia caught up with Shane Buckley, Gigamon CEO, who was in Singapore recently. Buckley shared more about their channel program and what he hopes to see from partners in the region, especially with the increasing opportunities in the APAC market.

Can you tell us a bit more about how Gigamon works with partners in the region.

We recognize we have a channel-led business, and we've got a channel assist business. So, our channels have gone through the enablement process that we provide for them.

Our distribution focus partners can take a project from start to finish. We give them incremental discount points because we want to reward them for the investments which they've made. And we provide deal registration for them as well to protect the deal.

We never, ever, ever take deals direct to the company. It's not what Gigamon does because we believe that our success is mutually connected to the success of our channel partners as well.

We're also very careful in terms of the channels that we assign, and we identify in each market. We don't want to be overdistributed either because that can create its own level of challenge.

While there are some larger vendors with a 2, 3, 4, 5% margin for the product, that's not much use to a channel partner. You can't invest in anything if you're just getting a cost of money return from the customer. And it doesn't serve the vendor either because then that vendor has to take on board the value for the delivery sometimes for service, professional service, etc, on behalf of the partner.

So, we've been very consciously looking at the retained margin for our channel partners for years. We actually run channel margin programs where we can enhance margin through SPFs and other programs to make sure our partners get more discount. And we're happy the more discount they get because that means they actually treat us with more respect.

Whilst we're not the largest company in the industry by far, our channel partners make more margin on Gigamon than they make on most other products. And so we're very happy with that because we recognize there's also an opportunity for a lot of professional services.

When we analyze our business over the last 20 years, in the first five years for a new customer, a channel partner can get basically 10 times the first order value in the first five years. Because when you sell Gigamon's Fabric, you have to sell it horizontally.

And when it comes to the vertical element, we vertically add more applications on top. For example, if we close a customer at just, say, half a million dollars for a deal, which would be a very ordinary sized customer for Gigamon first order value, that partner is going to get $5 million off them in the first five years.

Now, what's even more important is when we take a step back further is once one of our partners puts in our fabric into the network, they generally then connect all the tool stack into Gigamon. So, then they have an opportunity for another 4x return on the tool stack as well -security, observability, application performance, network tools.

So, that $500,000 order becomes $5 million in the first five years. That becomes an additional $20 million over the same period. So that $500,000 deal can be up to $25 million for that partner.

Now, how many vendors give you that sort of annuity revenue as Gigamon? And so a lot of smart partners feel if they can win this customer at Gigamon, the opportunity for them to grow with the customer and have recurring revenue in an environment where recurring revenue often is hard to get. It's a great opportunity and our partners really appreciate that.

We also reward our partners by ensuring that when it’s time for subscription renewals, we have a subscription attorney team in customer success. They'll actually do the renewal, give it to their partner, and pass it to the customer.

Hence, they have the opportunity to not just win it the first time, but every single year when it's being renewed as well. A lot of other vendors don't necessarily do that. They give the first order of value to the channel. They go, thanks for your service. We're going to take it directly after that. That's not part of our strategy.

With that said, what are you hoping to see more from partners?

Within our distribution focus partners, we are largely very happy with the confidence capability of our partners. To some of our newer kinds of emerging partners, I would say to them, these networks are very complex. The ability for them to continue to ensure they are enabled with the latest technology is very important.

In our meetings with partners and customers in the region, we talk through our AI roadmap. And many of them are really surprised, even though we have announced the first two stages of our roadmap. Partners need to keep current of what we're doing and the rate of innovation at Gigamon.

We are facing a lot of the very advanced complex problems that some of the largest, most complex, most secure networks in the world actually have. When you think about it, we sit inside most of the largest, most classified networks of governments, the biggest service provider networks, the biggest banks, superscalers, large transportation organizations, critical infrastructure, etc.

And so, where we sit tends to be very sensitive. Partners need to understand and keep up to speed with what we're doing. Because those present huge opportunities to the channel.

There's no point in coming late in the game when everyone else has figured out how to fix something. That's when your margins actually lower. For example, if a partner is selling some of the more tier one vendor standard products today, why are they surprised when they get 2%, 3%, or 4% margin? It’s because anyone can sell it. The customer probably knows as much about the product as the partner does. So, they don't really need the value.

However, when a partner is trying to fix a complex issue, for example, helping CISOs understand what LLMs are doing inside their infrastructure because the CEO, board, and even CIO are pushing them to deploy this. If the partner comes in 18 or 24 months later with an answer, guess what? They're probably six months too late, at least. Because someone else will come in, they'll have fixed the problem.

So, partners need to invest in technology enablement. They need to stay very close to what we're doing. And to the partners that keep close to us and invest with us, the rewards are massive.

What makes Gigamon stand out compared to other vendors when it comes to working with partners?

Gigamon is a fabric that can provide access to all traffic in the network, and we can extract north-southeast traffic from networks. We can consolidate the traffic, filter the traffic and create the highest signal-to-noise ratio for telemetry. It's the highest possible telemetry.

In fact, SOCs will say Gigamon's metadata is the starting point for when they do threat hunting. It seems to be the best possible quality they can possibly get.

We talk about typically the power of three. We do power of three programs all the time. We take Gigamon, Alliance Partner A, and Channel A, and we come together and say, here's our power of three program. For example, we've done Gigamon and Cribble with WWT in the US. A big program which we launched and ran events. We said problem statement is X and the solution is taken Gigamon with Cribl.

We've also done Gigamon with ExtraHop, Gigamon with Vectra and local partner. So, the partner has an opportunity to reach our marketing team and say they’d like to be part of this power of three program. And we put together events and we bring in experts.

So, we don't just try to talk about what Gigamon does. We say by putting Gigamon together with this tool solution, you get this incremental benefit. What we've done as vendors is we've worked together to make sure the deployment of the product is seamless. And then the channel partner gets all the benefits because they're bringing us to the market. They're bringing the customers together with us and then we all reap the rewards.

So, I would say to any of the partners, reach out to us and say, hey, what power of three programs are relevant for me? Because we do power of three across a whole range of different environments. We ultimately have over 600 alliance partners as a company and can support them.