Sydney: Anthony, you’ve been at Zscaler for about five months now. How do you see Zscaler differentiating itself in the market?
Anthony: I knew Zscaler was a great company with great technology, but what I didn’t know, what I realize now, is that it’s really all about the people and the culture here at Zscaler, which makes it such a special place and what really differentiates Zscaler from the rest of the industry.
And so, it all starts with the people having a great mission, having a great vision. As you know, we’ve had some new leaders come on board—sales, partners and alliances, even a new chief product officer in the past couple of months. Those are really the keys, the difference that we’re making in the market.
But that’s just one part of it. The other part is when you think about it, the industry has changed, and customers are no longer buying products. Customers want to buy outcomes, right? In order to do that, you have to have great products and great solutions, and you have to deliver on the promises of those products and solutions.
So, when I think about our Zero-Trust architecture and how it’s helping customers, it’s all about enhancing their security posture, reducing the complexity of legacy networking technologies and—what we hear all the time—is that we’re able to take out customers’ environments. That’s really helping them transform in ways they never thought were possible before. Last, but not least, a big differentiator for us is our partners. When I got here, we had a great foundation of partners, but one thing I didn’t realize was the vast nature of all the different partner segments that we have, including a highly capable, qualified partner ecosystem that can deliver the platform.
Sydney: Speaking of the partner ecosystem, what role do partners play in Zscaler’s path to $5 billion?
Anthony: Well, they’re critical. Sydney, we can’t—we’ve publicly stated this—we can’t, we won’t get to $5 billion and then $10 billion and beyond without our partner ecosystem. Everything that we do includes partners. And then we act as one team.
So, our goal is to always show up together with a partner, never to have, you know, sort of parallel efforts, because that’s what our customers want. And that’s about delivering on the common objectives of our customers, really going in with a one-team mentality. And we truly believe that.
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Sydney: What opportunities is Zscaler providing for partners to capitalize on the growth in cybersecurity?
Anthony: So, truly rewarding those partners throughout the customer lifecycle is our goal. And so, you’re going to see more investments. Let me give you some examples. We’re going to have an update—a program update—coming out soon, and it’s going to be highly focused on specializations. And when I say specializations, think about things like data protection.
Think about the user experience, cyber threat protection, security-led AI. These are the emerging technologies that are helping our customers become more secure. And our partners are at the forefront. So, we want to make sure that we are rewarding our partners for investing in the training and enablement of those emerging technologies.
That’s number one. Number two, we’re going to be introducing new deployment guides so that, again, they can deliver great outcomes for our customers. But not only that, we’re going to allow them to have access now to our health check tools. Our health check tools give keen insights into our customers’ environments so that they can now see: is a customer leveraging the full value of the platform?
Have they used best practices as a financial services customer or a manufacturing customer? These are all the great insights that we get, and we get to build into our AI engine. And then last but not least, we’re going to be launching the idea of Zscaler Aces. And that is an exclusive invite-only technical community that will be made up of our highest qualified, our highest competent Zscaler implementers and delivery architects out in the ecosystem.
Like I said before, we can’t get to our next phase of growth without our partner community, without our partner ecosystem. And I will say confidently, after, you know, five months, I don’t know that there’s a better company to partner with than Zscaler right at this point in time.