Netskope’s Antony Prasad on growing the channel ecosystem in Southeast Asia
Antony Prasad is Netskope’s new Senior Channel and Partnership Lead for Southeast Asia.
Netskope recently appointed Antony Prasad as its new Senior Channel and Partnership Lead for Southeast Asia. With over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, Prasad will focus on developing and establishing partnerships to accelerate the adoption of the Netskope One platform and its AI-ready capabilities across the region.
This includes developing the vendor’s local channel ecosystem, strengthening existing collaborations, and onboarding new partners to further deepen Netskope’s penetration in strategic, high potential markets in the region. Prasad will also help joint prospects and customers modernize cloud and AI era requirements.
Prior to joining Netskope, Prasad had various roles across the networking, cybersecurity and cloud, with a number of tech companies including Cisco, Riverbed Technology, Verizon, BT Group, Ekahau, VMware / VeloCloud, Fastly, and Cato Networks.
A highly accomplished sales and channel leader, Prasad’s technical foundation proved instrumental in building tailored offerings and services with partners across APAC.
Commenting on Prasad’s appointment, Kunal Jha, Regional Director for Asia at Netskope said the tech landscape is changing fast with ongoing AI and cloud advancements transforming operations and bringing major challenges that legacy architectures can’t address.
“In response, organizations across Southeast Asia need to accelerate the transformation of their networking and security infrastructure. Antony’s deep expertise across security, networking, and cloud, and his knowledge of APAC markets make him a strong asset not only for Netskope, but also to accompany regional partners and customers through this transition,” Jha said.
Speaking to CRN Asia exclusively since taking on his new role, Prasad said that with Netskope consistently named a leader in the SASE space by Gartner, Forrester and other third-party analysts, the prospect of contributing to channel operations in the region was interesting.
“When meeting with regional leaders, we discussed the company’s vision for the channel in the region, as well as some of the challenges, and growth opportunities and objectives, and we were really aligned on everything, so I believe it was a natural match,” he said.
Growing the channel ecosystem
Prasad also highlighted that he has a strong background growing partners across APJ, including working with strategic partners, distributors, resellers, MSPs, Telcos and systems integrators. He believes think these existing relationships and his overall experience will be key in driving additional growth for the partner ecosystem.
“In the short-term, my priority is to understand established relationships and to meet with distributors and resellers in each country. I’ll be aiming to understand how we work together, our current engagements, pipeline, and activities, and identify where there might be room for improvement. The aim is also to identify new opportunities, especially around AI security because Netskope’s capabilities in this area are really strong, and there is strong demand from businesses to adopt and deploy AI securely, and how we can enable them. After this phase, I will be in a better position to evaluate where I can suggest new initiatives or expansions,” he explained.
On his long-term goals, Prasad believes that Netskope needs to lean towards a model of local channel ecosystems in each country that operate as extensions of Netskope and are self-sufficient in terms of driving their own pipeline, POC/POVs, customer demos, training, and various customer awareness activities.
“This vision requires working with the relevant distributors to acquire resellers, focus resellers to open up markets and support customer opportunities, MSP partners to offer services around Netskope, and strategic Telco and SI partners offering full Netskope built solutions and services to their customers,” he said.
Prasad also added that he his looking forward to working with partners in the region to generate awareness, create opportunities, and bring Netskope’s SASE and AI security capabilities to more organizations.
For Prasad, at the moment, many businesses across Southeast Asia are in a balancing act between keeping up with AI and cloud innovation and transformation and addressing the security vulnerabilities coming with this adoption.
“Netskope’s platform helps solve this conundrum with capabilities that enable organizations to transform with peace of mind, and I think this is a relevant value proposition for us and our partners,” he added.