Zscaler: Partners must evolve beyond product sales to secure the AI era

Foad Farrokhnia, VP of Channels and Alliances, Asia Pacific and Japan, Zscaler believes that partners need to go beyond just selling products but also show more value to customers by becoming trusted advisors to them.

In the Asia Pacific region, organizations remain challenged in securing their data, especially when it comes to managing and having visibility over employees using AI for work. Shadow AI remains a constant problem with employees continuing to access many AI sites despite organizations having guardrails in place in how AI is used and accessed.

At Zscaler’s ZenithLive Summit in Las Vegas in June this year, the cybersecurity vendor unveiled several new products as it looks to tackle the increasing security challenges organizations are facing in their AI journey. Zero trust becomes an increasingly important aspect in the AI era, with organizations wanting to have more visibility, not just on their employees but also on AI agents that are being deployed throughout the organization.

For Zscaler’s partner ecosystem, while the market opportunity is there, Foad Farrokhnia, VP of Channels and Alliances, Asia Pacific and Japan, Zscaler believes that partners need to go beyond just selling products but also show more value to customers by becoming trusted advisors to them.

In a conversation with CRN Asia, Farrokhnia discusses the trends he is seeing in the region as well as the role of partners in making sure organizations are well prepared from a security perspective in their AI journey.

Specifically, Farrokhnia believes that while Zscaler remains consistent on its Zero Trust proposition, the cybersecurity vendor is still very much able to support customers in their AI journey.

“This is especially critical in how customers bring a level of value with regard to their investments in AI. That value needs to come from the ability to deploy AI in a way that's secure, safe and driving productivity and return for them,” he said.

Farrokhnia explained that while the APAC region remains one of the biggest and fastest adopters in AI, the level of manipulation that's also now possible for bad actors out there to start taking advantage of this is also increasingly faster.

“This creates a real opportunity for Zscaler and partners to come together and work together to help these organizations get the outcomes they need, make sure it's secure and safe, and deliver value over the time frame of that investment. However, the defense is not where it needs to be and governance is not necessarily where it needs to be. Some organizations are having anywhere from a million to a million and a half sort of agents working simultaneously across their data. And if that doesn't have that governance around it, you can expect absolute chaos,” he explained.

For Farrokhnia, organizations that have the governance and security measures built into their guardrails will now look to innovation and productivity gain. But he believes that there is still an opportunity and risk, which customers are experiencing as they kind of navigate that journey for their organizations.

At Zscaler’s ZenithLive Summit in Las Vegas in June this year, the cybersecurity vendor unveiled major innovations to extend the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform to secure AI Agents – how they connect, access data, and run on devices. With these innovations, Zscaler is delivering the industry’s first complete Zero Trust platform for Agentic AI.

“We made a number of investments, acquisitions, and now have an AI security portfolio, which is incremental to our whole zero trust exchange proposition. Our partners can go customers and share this great value proposition around our Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange and what that can do for them as the perimeter dissolves,” Farrokhnia said.

These include Zscaler AI Broker which helps secure agentic communications through MCP and A2A brokers and Zscaler Endpoint AI Security that helps customers find and stop AI-related threats on employee devices, including risks hidden in browsers, plugins, extensions, and local AI tools.

Meanwhile, the Zscaler AI Access Graph is identities, applications, and other data sources connected across the enterprise. The integration of this technology, which is powered by Zscaler's recent acquisition of Symmetry Systems, with Zscaler’s Zero Trust Exchange enables organizations to understand and then enforce policies, reduce unnecessary access and risk, and track data lineage in real-time across every channel.

“The Zscaler AI Access Graph is sort of the family tree of how all these agency workflows, data sets, users and such communicate and align with each other, in real time, understanding whether the right access is given to the right entities through that process. And I think it all really boils down to visibility and the right guardrails to be able to actually secure and really drive that outcome,” he added.

With these new solutions, Farrokhnia believes that partners now have the opportunity to bring customers more value in securing their AI. What follows is the rest of the conversation between Farrokhnia and CRN Asia. Do note that the conversation has been edited for clarity.

Can partners keep up with innovation from Zscaler?

I want to reinforce to partners that they are just building on the same platform here. The only thing is they're in the advantageous position of having already invested and building capability around this platform. So now it's just an incremental uptake to go into some of the other functions here.

But in saying that, I think some partners will continue to engage in the market and with customers in their traditional ways. And some will evolve, and there will be some very new entrants as well that we'll start to see. My hope is that the partners that have been supporting us and working with us and our customers for the last several years can go through that evolution of being able to adapt, to train up and to build the capabilities.

Some partners will evolve and move and be able to adapt. Some partners will continue in their traditional sort of state of play. And it doesn't mean that they don't have an opportunity. The opportunity is still there. They just might not move into this opportunity.

And then there are some real innovators and partners that have already started to build some centres of excellences, which from a customer perspective, would be beneficial as they want the more comprehensive and newer protection, especially with AI coming in.

Wouldn’t customers want to work with partners that have the capabilities of delivering more innovative solutions?

There's definitely a lot more scrutiny as to which partner a customer is going to actually work with here. To be honest, I'm seeing existing accounts with existing partners and then the customer asking us advice on how they can move forward? Can they still rely on the same partner, or do they need to look at more?

From a channels and alliances perspective and what I like to do at Zscaler is to give our partners, especially our strategic focus partners, as much opportunity to be able to actually keep up and adapt and move.

But again, we don't have a lot of time. Customers are moving very fast into this. A lot of them have moved into production at the business function level and now feel they should have probably thought about how they're going to secure this stuff. And so, they're looking at SIs and various partners.

GSIs are obviously playing a big part here, especially at building something at scale for an organization to make sure that all the guardrails are in place and that they can actually have the security they need to really drive some productivity out of this stuff.

And I think the partners that are just starting to build their capabilities around this may miss out on that immediate opportunity.

Is it really challenging or complicated to build those capabilities for your partners?

Look, I think it varies depending on where they come from. What's the foundation that they have today? I find that some of the partners we work with that have been predominantly just shifting boxes are going to struggle a little bit to really kind of expand from that and do things differently. But we saw that even going from legacy architecture to cloud. We saw a lot of partners kind of struggle with that for a while, and some are no longer around.

Others really strengthened and did a lot better. So, I'm seeing obviously a strong play from our GSIs at the moment. We announced our Project Guardian initiative, which is really around working with some of those larger GSIs.

We're doing some great work with EY out here at the moment, Deloitte and some of the Indian SIs as well, where we're really kind of coming together and thinking about those centers of excellences which is one of the ecosystem models that they can actually start to integrate and bring together. It’s also one of the roadmap type opportunities they can take customers through to make sure that their investments continue to deliver.

And really, it's about realizing value for those types of engagements. So, I see strength in that. I think there's also a mapping to the segment of customers that we go into, both from a size perspective, as well as the vertical that they're in.

I think some partners, maybe they're not the AI experts, but they certainly bring regional expertise. They understand the dynamics and the mechanics of a particular country, especially the regulatory and cultural elements of it. So, I think there's opportunity even for those partners that are not necessarily going to be ahead of the game on the AI conversation, but certainly they can drive value and bring insight around some of those local nuances, which we know APJ in particular is.

What are partners also looking to get more from you guys as well in return?

I think it's probably quite consistent with what you hear from other vendors, but I think right now as we're going through this kind of evolution of market demand and what customers need, training is super critical.

Our partners are constantly coming to us and saying, "OK, you've just talked about this new capability. How do I get really skilled at it?” I think that demand talks to the partnerships we've built over the last several years and the level of trust and confidence we have.

So, we're rapidly working on this investment in training and the ability to specialize and authorize our partners because that gives them the confidence to go and have a conversation with the customer. The customer feels more confident to engage with them. It's a much more seamless conversation for the partner with the customer.

So training is a big one for us, giving them the accreditation to be able to actually front up into customer conversation. The second one is profitability, which continues to be a big conversation point. And I think this goes back to the ability to deliver value.

I think the world of just being able to transact and see margins upon margins is starting to evolve. So, our conversation with partners is always, how do you deliver more value around what you take to the customer? And so, we're doing some special initiatives as well with some of our focus partners where we provide some shadowing help around delivery, deployment, proof of value conversations, architecture workshops. Again, what we're trying to do is transfer that skill to them so that they feel like they're able to deliver much more value than just transacting.

For example, in the services piece, the deployment around services, and of course, in some cases, the managed service is where we see that opportunity for partners to really drive value.

And then in our GSI, advisory consulting partners is really around, how do I have those board-level conversations to influence outcomes that deliver the right value for the customer? And we know that GSIs, advisory and consulting partners need to be somewhat unbiased about how they do that. But what we try and do at Zscaler is give them all of the ammunition in terms of, what exactly is the value prop of what we do?

So that when it makes sense and it is the right proposition, they're able to confidently influence and drive that outcome with board-level executives at a customer firm. And we're seeing some of that play out really nicely as well in this market.

What is your advice then to your partners who are still not making that move and those that have already made it?

I could be very brash and say, just get on with it. Because time is running out. But I think probably the more consultative conversation here would be, get really clear around what you want your value proposition to be for the next 6 to 12 months. If you're very clear around that, then you build what you need to be able to execute.

So, understand your capability, figure out what your value property is in the current context, and then work with us to make sure you build the right practices to be successful.

And we're here to help you to be able to do that.