Customer centricity still key to success in fast-paced AI era, says Gigamon CEO

“You got to be listening to what your customers are saying. When we talk to customers, five times out of ten, it’s not about making a better product. It's about leveraging technology; rolling out solutions; helping with compliance issues.”

While enterprises are clamouring to accelerate AI adoption in Asia, CISOs are getting increasingly nervous and under heightened pressure to secure the organization’s defenses. This is why it is especially vital for security vendors and partners to work closely with customers and be extra steps ahead to suggest potential risks or gaps.

“The cybersecurity industry has been completely thrown on its head because the new norm is very different to the old way. Even at a basic level, the asymmetry in an AI world is staggering,” Shane Buckley, CEO at Gigamon told CRN Asia.

Buckley understands that “it’s been a tough job for a very long time” anyway, but it’s only getting tougher for CISOs. From his observation of the intense pace of change, discussions with customers and partners, and the rise of applications like Anthropic’s Mythos and quantum tech, “the odds are well in favor of AI”.

“They’ve got the ability to identify an infinite number of vulnerabilities in software, which means that they could potentially make the endpoint and security software systems somewhat irrelevant if they're able to punch through in an automated way,” he said.

“The security team is at a huge disadvantage because unless they’re getting full visibility of all traffic, both north, south, or through the firewall, and east, west, or laterally, it's possible people can be inside your network. You just don't know.”

A positive outcome of the “nervous time” we live in is that security leaders are working closer together than ever before due to the high levels of uncertainty. Buckley shared that CISOs are trying to work together as a community to share experiences and ideas, regardless of industry or geography.

Vendors and the ecosystem are also strengthening partnerships to build their stack capabilities. For instance Gigamon, which has an existing large pool of alliance partners, is working even closer with next-generation SIEM vendors to enable its deep observability pipeline and optimize telemetry.

‘Customers often give us the best ideas’

Beyond building alliance partnerships, Buckley also believes keeping up with customers and partners have helped Gigamon stay on top of the game through the decades and changing market demands.

“Our customers often give us the best ideas because they’re dealing with the real challenges,” he said.

Gigamon runs customer advisory boards on a global basis, where they invite customers across different sectors, including government and enterprises, and figure out how best to meet their business needs.

“[We ask] What problems do you have today? Where are your problems of the future?” he said. “We scrupulously take that down and analyze it and see is this something we should do? Why should we do it? Why should we do it now? And what would be the impact of providing this capability?”

The team engages in similar conversations with alliance and channel partners as well, who he counts as tremendous sources of information. Such discussions are especially critical to stay aligned with the market’s overwhelming pace of change.

“The way to stay ahead is to continue to out innovate everyone else,” he said.

Above all, Buckley believes the best way to sustain market leadership is to simply listen to what customers want — and this is the advice he gives to partners as well. He added that specialization is the way forward for the industry.

“We look at things that actually meet the requirements of the customer,” he said. “You got to be listening to what your customers are saying.

“What could we do to make [their] job easier? I will tell you, five times out of ten, it’s not about making a better product. It’s about maybe leveraging technology [or] enabling technology. It’s about rolling out solutions [or] helping with compliance issues.

“It’s not all about the power of the product. It's about taking a great product, a great partnership and bringing it to market in a way that’s very focused and very aligned with what the customer wants.

“Being nimble enough to be able to change and alter what you’re pitching to the customer based on what the customer requires, because no two customers are exactly the same.”