Zscaler sees rising MSSP opportunity across Southeast Asia’s midmarket

The Southeast Asian region is a great hotspot for MSSPs, with customers really benefiting from what Zscaler’s partners are offering in that space.

According to Foad Farrokhnia, VP of Channels and Alliances, Asia Pacific and Japan, some of the cybersecurity vendors, including service providers and GSIs have already got a managed services offering in place. For these partners, Farrokhnia pointed out that the MSSP opportunity just becomes an additional outcome.

However, he also acknowledges that the MSSP offering is an area that Zscaler is looking to continue to invest in especially since there is an increasingly demanding opportunity among the mid-market segment as these businesses lack the resources needed to manage their cybersecurity.

“They’re looking for the services element from our partners, and so actually we launched an initiative with Westcon-Comstor (Westcon) in the region recently. We've done similar things with our other distributors in other markets as well. We probably made a bit more noise about the Westcon partnership because we've created almost cookie-cutter-type offerings that really kind of align with the midmarket opportunities, especially from a price, features and a speed-to-value perspective,” he said.

Farrokhnia also pointed out that the Southeast Asian region in particular is a great hotspot for MSSPs, with customers really benefiting from what Zscaler’s partners are offering in that space.

“So, Westcon provides the commercials and have now been authorized as a deployment partner as well. This means they can do services, and the partner has the relationship and does the specialty work that they already do with that account. This helps Westcom to be able to deliver an outcome for that size of customer who doesn't have necessarily all those services and support,” Farrokhnia explained.

Leveraging distributor capabilities

For Farrokhnia, distributors are becoming an increasingly important partner in Zscaler’s go-to-market in the region. Westcon has been one of the first distributor-partners to have a global offering on this, with the partnership also covering the EMEA region and the rest of APAC as well.

“We've been able to take something quite at scale to market. It's a bit of a pilot to see how well we can go and saturate this market and really support our customers, and then we'll continue to kind of solidify and expand that as probably more of a programmatic thing that we'll have as an offering to more distributors,” he explained.

At the same time, Farrokhnia also highlighted that partners in India like Tech Data have also built deployment services practice to do some great work around pre-sales services, POVs and architecture workshops and such. The partner has also done rapid engagements with customers, proving the value out of how the service can help, and then deploy and ensure that they're seeing the return.

“And they've done a great job of building that practice out, and we're seeing that play out for us as well. In Japan, similarly SB CNS is a strong distributor for us over there. It's been with us for a while, and they've also built this practice. We recently brought on Networld Corporation over there as well as a second distributor who's also leaning into this services kind of arm. And we're starting to see that,” he added.

Farrokhnia also shared that distributors are also realizing it's not just a transaction engagement at all.

“They have to bring that level of service because the partners actually demand it. Why would I go through a distributor if I'm not seeing the value? And so, this is a great value proposition that distributors are taking to partners to deliver to that segment,” he said.

The partner opportunity

With organizations focused on their AI development and deployment, Farrokhnia highlighted that more organizations are realizing the potential data leakage that they are being exposed to. And while there are still a lot of human elements involved in the use of AI, he believes the next 12 to 24 months could see an increase in agent-to-agent interaction and engagement, which is eventually becoming the norm.

“When we talk about the one million to one and a half million agents effectively in any given organization, you start to see a very different future for potentially what we need to actually secure and defend and put guardrails in place for. So, I think from a partner standpoint, the opportunity right now is very much around advisory and that consulting piece of how do I build a roadmap for securing what we know the future to be,” he said.

With customers realizing the need to have secure usage and visibility of AI, they also want partners to provide them with the best solutions available that can secure them.

“Partners have got a much more lateral view of what's happening around them outside of just one vendor's perspective. If they build that skill set and expertise, they can really help the customer build that roadmap out. And through every point of that lifecycle, be the trusted advisor that helps them actually deploy, deliver and drive outcomes as a result,” he said.

With the consultancy piece becoming critical in cybersecurity, Farrokhnia believes it's also as important in AI with a lot of partners moving towards that.

“It's not just delivering service anymore. And I think it's a great opportunity and our partners need to take that opportunity really seriously. They should not go into it sort of half-masked thinking they can just throw some ideas on here and create a creative practice around it. They should get out there and do it,” he concluded.