Netskope's A/NZ regional sales director, Yu Jing Cheng
Cloud security company, Netskope, is increasing its focus on the A/NZ region. The company has expanded, with the opening of a new office in Melbourne, inking some new partnerships, and has also made some appointments to support the regional operation.
Yu Jing Cheng has been named the company’s A/NZ regional sales director, while Michael See has been appointed as its sales engineering director. Both of them will operate from Netskope’s Melbourne operations.
The company’s also looking to increase its headcount in sales and engineering, especially with the appointment of a channel development manager and a channel inside sales representative.
“We need someone to develop channel strategies for us, with the result of generating more leads. We want to increase our focus and dedication to the channel and these appointments will help us to do just that,” he said.
Cheng mentioned the channel is key to Netskope’s success moving forward. It has already made deals with partners such as M.Tech, NEC, Zimbani and Insicon in the past three months to illustrate its commitment of adopting a channel-first approach.
As per the deals, the entire Netskope product range, including the Netskope Active Platform, its enterprise-grade Cloud DLP, encryption, anomaly detection and introspection solutions, will be made available in the region through these partners.
“A/NZ is at the forefront of Cloud computing adoption, especially SaaS, and its adoption has increased rapidly in almost every sector in this market over the past couple of years.
“But, although the confidence level of a transition to Cloud services remains reasonably high in this region, the security that is needed for a safe enablement has failed to keep pace. This is where our partners can add value to close that gap,” he claimed.
Netscope will be offering training and development to guide these new partners. Its worldwide channel enablement program will be rolled out to these channel partners, giving them access to Netscope’s certification programs, regular webinars, and joint marketing initiatives.
And according to Cheng, going forward, Netskope will only be looking to partner with just a handful of select partners that can target segments the company intends to leverage on.
“It’s a very tactical move by us and we want to focus on the government, media, health care, and finance sectors – as well as Cloud service providers across the board. We will announce further channel partner arrangements as the year progresses.”
Apart from the A/NZ region, Cheng mentioned that it’s looking to expand its bases into Singapore and Japan in the coming months. “That’s another reason why we decided on an operation here – it lets us talk to clients in Singapore and Japan.”
“In A/NZ, the Cloud SaaS market is growing at about 30 per cent YoY, so we’d like to chase after that market aggressively. Our aim is to match that YoY growth as a company and double or revenues each quarter,” he added.
