Sysdig keeps its partners to a ‘vital few’

Rather than having a large quantity of partners within its ecosystem, cloud security vendor Sysdig is keeping its partners down to a “vital few”, at 10 per geographic theatre.

This involved taking its partner ecosystem down from between 300 to 400 businesses, with Sysdig CRO Gary Olson saying those that remained are treated like family.

“We’re looking for people that want to come alongside and sit at the table with us and be part of the family,” he said.

The reasoning for this, Olson continued, is due to the combination of the complexities Sysdig deals with in the cloud security space combined with AI.

“It makes it very difficult from an enablement, activation and adoption perspective … I will tell you, if I was a channel partner or a reseller, it would be darn right unnerving,” he said.

“That’s why we decided to go with the vital few in this in this instance.”

Within Australia, these vital few include at least two partners – Sekuro and Innablr.

The importance of the trans-Tasman area

The Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) area is particularly important to Sysdig, as it represents one of its top three Asia Pacific and Japan regions from a growth perspective, according to the vendor’s vice president and general manager for APJ, Gavin Selkirk.

Of these top three markets, A/NZ make up a third of its booking contributions within APJ, which is on par with the other two top performers – India and Japan. Despite this, Selkirk also said A/NZ is its most difficult business within the region as there’s a strong reliance on direct relationships between vendors and customers.

“It’s still a little bit too much fascinated with direct and we can see lots of large enterprises that have taken their business away from partners and have a direct vendor relationship now,” he said.

Even with a tight selection of partners within its ecosystem, Olson, who was brought on board in March is no stranger to the region; his family on his mother’s side migrated to New Zealand and splits his time between the country across both North and South Islands of the country and the US.

“I like people that don’t pull punches; … what I’ve learned firsthand is the people [in A/NZ] are genuine, they’re honest, they like a sense of humour, but more importantly they’re serious about the business that they’re in,” he said.

In support of these partners, as well as those APJ-wide, Selkirk said Sysdig is broadly hiring across the region to ramp up support.

Previously, Sysdig relied heavily on sales engineers and its customer success organisation for its partner efforts. However, there was a desire for more focused support.

“One of the biggest challenges, in fact, the perennial challenge, especially in Australia, is getting an active selling dynamic within the partner community,” Selkirk said.

“We have a forming internal partner ecosystem team that’s relatively new; we managed the partner ecosystem from a direct sales standpoint previously.

“I would say we’re increasing the focus and it dovetails and underpins the strategy that [Olson] brought in terms of the narrow focus.”