Episode:
8

The Zero Trust Alliance Revolutionizing Cloud Security Partnerships

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Show Notes

On this week’s episode of the Investible Partnerships™podcast, we delve into the Zero Trust Alliance with leaders from AWS, Okta, Crowdstrike, and Zscaler. This episode explores the transformative impact of their collaboration on Cloud Security, illustrating the shift towards integrated solutions focussed on customer need and the pivotal role of channel partnerships within cloud Marketplaces. Through insights on overcoming internal challenges and leveraging the Zero Trust model, our guests showcase how this strategic alliances is not just enhancing cloud security but also redefining industry standards and customer value.

Key Takeaways

00:00 - Introduction

02:28 - Shifting from selling tools to providing solutions for customers

10:12 - Redefining Technology partnerships in cloud marketplaces

13:27 - Leveraging Technology partnerships like native services

16:50 - Using skills like humility and listening to align your partner organization

24:27 - Shifting mindset towards the customer outcome for your technology partnerships

26:19 - Partnering with multiple vendors and dealing with competitive friction

30:59 - The impact of cloud marketplaces on channel partners

34:23 - AWS Marketplace and scaling with Zero Trust channel partners

37:52 - Seeing success with the #zerotrustalliance in the APJ region

42:55 - The Partnerships Fast Five

"I think it's taking a step back and being I suppose, humble enough to appreciate that each of our individual capabilities are not the silver bullet, the be all and end all, that single platform to deliver every single security outcome that organizations are looking for.”

“Customers want fewer consoles and technologies, but still want to get the most out of their existing investment.”

My NorthStar is for our AWS channel and consulting partners listening to this. To think about the AWS marketplace and technology partners like Okta, Crowdstrike and Zscaler as equivalent as a native service the same way you'd be able to consume compute storage and databases."

Transcript

00:00 Des Russell  

Hey there, everyone. Welcome to the Investible Partnerships podcast. I've got LG, James, Justin, and Reagan joining me today on a different show that we're putting on today. We usually, on the podcast, we typically have one I am humbled, I've managed to assemble four, two that have come before, so it's not their first time. And that's Reagan and LG, and James and Justin and absolute welcome to the Investible Partnerships podcast. We've got a brilliant episode, I think, something that we've been planning all the way since last year for the four of us to get together or the five of us to get together. So, I'm happy that we've got it done. I think what's important to understand is that this is a really important topic not only for customers, but absolutely for our vendors and technology partnerships, particularly as we see the advancement of things like artificial intelligence, that's absolutely hitting us left, right and centre. So firstly, thank you to the four of you for joining me, it's already February, I can't believe it. Some of you are starting your fiscal year, some of you are midway through the quarter, and some are getting ready to get to the sales kick-off. So, I really appreciate your time, gentlemen, and thank you for joining me. But I'm going to hand over the mic to you and I'd love you to go around and let's give our listeners an understanding of who you are your role in your organization and we can kick off from there. Let's start with you LG.

01:59 LG  

Thanks this and thanks for having me again. It's a pleasure joining this crew today, who I've been working for over two years now, which is fantastic. So, I'm LG, I am the head of Cloud Partners for Okta in AP and I look after obviously the relationship with AWS and that of our extended technology partners like CrowdStrike and Zscaler.

02:23 Des Russell

Ok, Reagan.

02:27 Reagan Koryozo  

Awesome. Thanks. It's good to be back again. So I'm actually if you haven't seen the previous podcasts a Senior Partner Development Manager here at AWS across APJ,  working across the security and DevOps and observability partners and Okta being one of mine and this partnership, this trio here is I think one of the one of the great experiments, I guess, that we undertook probably 12 months ago, it's been really exciting to see the progress and get these gentlemen on the podcast.

02:55 Des Russell  

Ok, Justin.

02:56 Justin McGarr  

Thanks for having me today. Great, great to be here and obviously in such an esteemed company. So, I look after our technology, alliance relationships, and Zscaler across Australia and New Zealand. So, I've been working with these guys for a number of years and so it's great to finally bring something a joint initiative to fruition. So, I look forward to discussing that more today.

03:20 Des Russell  

And finally, James.

03:24 James Chung  

Good. Hey, guys and listeners out there. James Chung here, been with CrowdStrike for about a year and a half and my role is looking after cloud alliances across Australia and New Zealand. Pleasure to be here.

03:35 Des Russell  

Excellent so, let's get straight into it. So, when we think about Zero Trust that is gaining a lot of traction, particularly over the last couple of years. When I think for Zero Trust, it's really about moving away from technical concepts and security postures to really looking at the way customers solve their modern security problems with a more holistic approach. And when we think about AWS bringing this alliance together, Reagan, I'd love to understand a little bit more about what drove that. I mean, you’re existing partners and partners in across the globe, across various geographies. So, what really brought the need for you to think about the way you approach zero trust with your customers differently with your technology partnerships?

04:33 Reagan Koryozo  

Yeah, good question. I think when we look at cloud in general, and the relationship that AWS has with our customers, they're looking more and more for solutions, not tools, not technology. They want AWS to help influence and help them transform and get solutions for their customers then within their own business. And security for us at AWS is job zero for everyone. It is everyone's responsibility, not just the security teams and if you're familiar with that, shared responsibility model for the cloud, it's our job as AWS to manage security of the cloud. But then security in the cloud is the customer's responsibilities.

And this is where our partners. technology partners like to three, hear play really influential roles and coming together to help our customers managing security in the cloud and getting to a security outcome, right, not just buying the tools for the sake of buying the tools, but to really build the zero trust approach the strategy, how they manage security in the cloud, how they manage their culture of security in the cloud, which can be different to how they potentially manage security. In, the old world, you could say, a free cloud. And so, for us, it's really exciting because this partnership, and I wish we could take credit for I but these three vendors and these three gentlemen, have been incredible at coming together and understanding what AWS is trying to do with our customers and how we're trying to bring solutions.

And they've done a lot of the legwork in an understanding that as three really important partners for us and building this unique value proposition for our customers where the three technologies combined help the customer with what they're trying to achieve with cloud security and zero trust. So, they've been incredible. And I think very much a leader when it comes to technology partner, and technology partner alliances, which is a first right, it's hard enough sometimes to get two vendors to work together let alone three. So, I think it's a credit to them, right? Understanding our goal, their customers, introducing solutions to them, and then coming together and doing that and coming to AWS with a really unique value proposition that we can help accelerate and bring to us to our customers or to our partners.

06:37 Des Russell

So, what I'm hearing here, it's really more about moving away from individual products and really moving into more an integrated solutions. So, LG, why, what are you seeing at Okta? Why is this an important part of the way you talk to customers or what have you seen from your customers that really drive you into this particular alliance?

07:05 LG  

So, our customers have been telling us for years that they want to simplify the way they integrate business solutions, they want to simplify the way they approach security in particular cloud security. The Cloud Security Alliance was formed back in 2013, and CrowdStrike and Zscaler were founding members, we actually, we've been collaborating at a global level for quite a long time. The purpose of the alliance is to raise awareness as to what the best practices for cloud security. And from there, we've been talking about the integrations that we've done at a technological level to create zero trust environments for our customers worldwide.

Why did we get drawn into this? Well, started by key customers demanding a solution and alternative to the status quo out there. And that started in the US, we managed to work together through the alliance and get a great level of success. We manage them to incorporate partners in the North America regions that would help us deliver but more importantly continued to support the evolution of cloud security for our customers as they evolve their businesses. And we saw this and said, what if we were to export this to the ANZ market? And furthermore, to come to the APJ Market, which you know, there's a potential need here and here's where we are.

08:40 Des Russell

Okay. Love it. Justin, and James, what have you seen from a customer? Are you also seen customers really looking for more integrated solutions? And what brought you to this alliance?

08:55 Justin McGarr

Well, I think, you know, in today's market, there are no customers anymore, that have bucket loads of cash to throw at business problems. So, you know, what we're seeing is the need to consolidate, the need to optimize and then need to integrate. So if there are organizations that have already invested heavily in one of us, for example, how can they then optimize that, that expenditure with similar minded organizations that can help optimize, deliver, enhance their security capabilities and posture and, and take them, advance them from where they are today? So again, you know, what we're hearing, it's that, that optimization, it's how do I realize on existing investments, and enhance where I go from here? So, again, you know, like, say, coming back to three similar minded organizations where we can deliver on all three of those. It's where the markets heading and where the customers want to go. And I suppose the cherry on top is that we're helping solve those customer issues at the same time.

10:12 Des Russell  

Love it and James?

10:14 James Chung

Yeah, I think Justin stole the words right out of my mouth. Yeah, at a macro level, what we're seeing is customers wanting to consolidate into as few panes of glass and as few consoles as possible, right? They want to they want to trim the fat in terms of their technology investments, but at the same time, get the most out of their existing investments as well. And a way to do that is through the integration of various technologies, the technologies that they've got within an across their security stack. Yeah. Yeah.

10:43 Des Russell  

So, it's really like the, if you think about it, it's combining the strengths around the customer. And probably, you know, I think this is really looking at more redefining what we would typically see of Technology Partnerships in cloud marketplaces, because when I think about it, we kind of go, why do we do it? What's a technology partnership? Well, the reality is, we're either looking to go and dominate a particular market, or particularly come together to really get some more market share. We have a capability gap in our offering. I mean, we'd love to do absolutely everything or for everyone. But the reality is, when we start to think about holistic solutions end to end, there are areas where we've got strengths, there are areas where we're probably a little bit weaker.

So, when you think about this, I think it's more a redefining of what Technology Alliances and Technology Partnerships could look like in cloud marketplaces. How do you reconcile that as a group? Or as for individual organizations that are driving towards you know, your own goals? Is it as simple as just getting around the customer and understand what the customer needs? Or is there a little bit of internal challenges that you've really got to meet? In terms of, why do we need this kind partnership, why do we need Okta? why do we need CrowdStrike? Why do we need AWS? Can we just go do this ourselves?

12:34 Justin McGarr  

I mean, I think it's taking a step back and being I suppose humble enough to appreciate that each of our individual capabilities are not the silver bullet, the be all and end all that that single platform to deliver every single security outcome that organizations are looking for. And we appreciate that it's an ecosystem play, and that we're individually market leaders in where we play, and we say, we lead here, we don't want to go and work in the endpoint or the threat intelligence space with against CrowdStrike. We don't want to go and work in the identity space against Okta, let's come together and let's deliver this best of breed integrated ecosystem to deliver the best outcomes for the customers.

13:27 Reagan Koryozo  

It's a really good point, big part of our culture within AWS has been since the day we've been formed is having a build a culture where we help our customer build solutions to achieve an outcome. And when you think of AWS's portfolio products, we have 200 plus services that a customer can build on top of no. My NorthStar is a Partner Manager and how I want a lot of our channel and consulting partners to think is that our technology partners can be the equivalent of our native services. So, in the identity space, right, is a company that's built world class identity solutions on AWS, they've done the building for you, right, so as a channel and a consulting partner, why go and build your own custom identity.

And even for customers listening to this, why go and invest your own developer resource into building your own in-house identity when a company like Okta has done it already on AWS. And so, my NorthStar is for our channel and consulting partners listening to this. Think about marketplace and the three partners here the equivalent for native service the same way you'd be able to get compute storage and databases, you've got these world class security solutions already in your AWS portfolio that you can integrate into how you're delivering on AWS and cloud.

14:36 LG  

And just to add to that, as well, I mean, having been in the industry for well over two decades now showing my age. You see that man tech organizations have integrations right with multiple businesses out there, but the reality is very rarely, do they talk to customers about the importance and relevance of having something proven, tested, ready to go that solve a specific problem. And what I'm very passionate about here is that we're actually doing this, we're actually going not only each of us have integrated on the AWS platform, but we’ve also integrated ourselves as well.

And so, we've got an end to end solution that works has been tested multiple times, enormous customer success. But yet nobody's talking about that narrative deal now outside of the US. But to help answer that question, as well. And I wanted to add to what Justin said, I think it takes people as well to drive something like this. And people from all angles not just the four of us, but an extended team of people that are behind these are technical resources, go-to-market resources, our sellers, our product engineering groups, our strategic groups.

But recently, we've learned through these as well, this is kind of new on how we have our marketing solution positioning as opposed to a specific product. And we've concluded that the need for a localized partner to help us join all the dots and help us channel and funnel a conversation with that particular customer. It's certainly elevating the way that we position this and accelerating how we get traction with those customers. Because it is a journey right to adopt cloud security. It's not an endpoint. It's an ongoing effort and so we're here to help, we're here to continue to position solutions that help. But ultimately, we need that overseen structure and that's provided by a partner.

So, there's a lot to talk in terms of, Hey, is it just the vendor, or is there a partner underneath that actually is holding all of this together And helping those customers?

16:49 Des Russell

Yeah, absolutely. I think we'll double click on there, because I think that it's how do you get to the customer and who is at the cold face with the customer? It's not only vendors, but also not only partners, there's sometimes multiple partners. So, what I want to hear from James an Justin, when you think about what LG has said around aligning your internal organization, you know, this is probably a strategic partnership or an alliance that has come at an executive level down or was this something that's come from the field up?

17:37 James Chung

Both, you know, we're obviously hearing it filtered down from leadership at a global level. But obviously, there's, you know, with LG, bringing the crew together initially, you know, at a ground level, driving interest at customer events and diving into the topic a little bit deeper with stakeholders at AWS as well, whether it's in line with what they're seeing from their customers or so, yeah, that that would be my answer.

18:03 Justin McGarr

And I think in addition to that, all of our sales teams are talking to similar folk at end user organizations. And so, it is a great way for them to come together. And swap Intel and collaborate and understand is what I'm hearing true, is what you're hearing is what you're hearing going to help me enhance my talk track or narrative back into that customer or that prospect or even back to the partner. So again, I think that that local collaboration is where the rubber meets the road and where this has got the potential to accelerate?

18:42 Des Russell

Yeah, absolutely love it, I think it's a bit of an outside in kind of approach. You know, we put the customer at the centre. I talk about this quite often with guests on our podcast than even though we are building capability in our channels for our technology to go and solve a particular customer's problems, and we're integrating in an ecosystem approach to doing that. Rarely is that being clear on what the customer's problem is, and how their customers problem can be solved requires a little bit of humility. I think you mentioned that before Justin, a bit of humility to kind of go these are my strengths, these are my particular weaknesses. But it also requires a very much a listening approach, which I don't know we always see in partnerships and alliances. Right. And I see Regan you're smiling here this.

It's this concept to really understand what others are seeing in the market what others are hearing from Customers and being able to go well, am I open to understanding truly what that problem actually is? We probably lean on quite a bit from, you know, we kind of think hyperscalers, the three biggest hyperscale cloud marketplaces. So, from an AWS point of view, we're listening to what AWS is saying but Raegan, how are you reconciling that internally? You have one of the biggest cloud marketplaces in the globe, but we still have an opportunity to listen and learn from our partners.

20:42 Reagan Koryozo

Absolutely customer obsession for us as our number one leadership principle, and we talked about working backwards from the customer, there's all our favourite words in AWS in them. But at times we can, I can be brutally honest, sometimes we forget that our partners are our customers, right and listening to what they're hearing from the field. Because all these three vendors are here at the coalface of customer challenges when it comes to security.

So, as much as we're talking to our customers about cloud, we need to understand there's a lot that we can gain from their intelligence in the field as well, and what they're listening what they're hearing. And like any good partnership, I think it's marrying insights in the middle, what we're seeing what the what our partners are seeing coming together, understanding how we can bring all four of us who to bring value to the table for our customers. And I've got to give credit to the three here because having worked in partnerships, now for many years, a lot of partners can want one, particularly from someone like AWS, what I'd say AWS can do for us. But these three vendors have done incredible job in spending time with us understanding how we're going to customers with a real solution focus and building that value proposition and coming back to us and saying, Hey, AWS, we have this trilogy, there's this alliance, where we can help your customer and so they've made my job really easy as a PDM.

To then take that messaging, which aligns with what we're hearing day in day out internally into my business. Whereas if they were a little bit combative, and had their own way of doing things, it makes my job as a partner manager a little bit harder, right? Because they're challenging the status quo of the way, we want to approach customers instead of working alongside that. So, for any partnership, professional listening, listen to what all your vendors and your partners are telling you how they're going to market, what challenges they're talking to customers about and try and meet in the middle. They're trying to help the vendor or any partner you're working with, solve their problems as well as your own.

22:37 Des Russell

Yeah, love it. I think the listening part if we just kind of say you don’t need to listen, you don't always need to act, right. So, it's, and I think the difference between listen and act is that you act in a way that's purposeful for your strategy and your objective. I mean, let's make, no qualms about this. The four organizations represented here today have very different clear strategic objectives that you're trying to drive. But the reality is that the power of bringing everyone together is what I call this value multiplier, this value multiply is not on the technology side, the actual value multiplies on the customer.

Because it's the customer where we're going to extract that value, and when we can be more relevant to their customer, and we can maximize our value there. I think we've got a winning opportunity to lay the foundation for a lot more partnership and a lot more integration as well.  Justin, any points on your side in terms of what did you feel? I mean, it's not all roses, right? It's not all sunshine and happy smiles. So, what for you was the hardest, or the most difficult thing internally, to get the rest of the team across this particular alliance?

24:27 Justin McGarr  

I think it takes a bit of a mindset shift. You know, Zscaler has a 100% channel business. So, it was changing the mindset of I'm already working with a partner on this on this opportunity. I therefore can't work with your technology alliances and it's breaking down the barrier, so to speak and to say, well, I'm not trying to take business away from your channel partner. I'm trying to enhance your knowledge of the account of the key stakeholder elders have the key initiatives to help you change your narrative if you have to, when you go back and talk with the channel partner and with the customer or the prospect, so take this, you know, build your network, build your knowledge, because there might be something critical that you're missing, which enables you to, to alter that. Why now for the customer? Because the biggest challenge that we all face with organizations is, well, what happens if I don't do something?

Do I just carry on in my own my own my own world and ignore this. So, it's build the knowledge building network by collaborating with the extended ecosystem, so that your talk track your narrative, your knowledge, can accelerate. And, and if you need to pivot on your approach with the customer, and obviously, including the channel partner in that as well, then, so be it, but you've got various points of view to take into, into account. So again, I suppose the biggest challenge was changing that mindset shift and being open to the conversations is not a threat. It's healthier?

26:11 Des Russell

Yeah, absolutely. James, did you see this something similar or different in CrowdStrike?

26:18 James Chung  

Justin spoke about being 100% channel business as a scale up. Also, with CrowdStrike. We like to think of ourselves as 100% channel led businesses. Well, that leads to interesting question, though, like, there's, there's everyone just because we're 100% channel business, does this mean everyone knows how to partner effectively, even when there's one partner involved? And then you, take it to involving two or three or four, even five partners, right? And how does that dynamic change as well? So, it's not as simple as bringing the three or four sales teams together and giving them an asset and a case study and saying, off you go and sell it now, right? Yeah, right.

There are other stakeholders from a technical point of view as well, who want to really understand things at a much deeper level. And they get caught up in details such as, you know, what if there's overlapping parts of various platforms, and what do we do when there's friction there, from a competitive standpoint, you're going to work through that, we're going to make sure they feel comfortable in terms of having a shared demo environment that they're enabled to present when it comes to customer events that we're planning further down the line from a go to market perspective as well.

And even with the marketing things as well, right, I mean, every single marketing organization, although, you know, at a high level, they serve a similar function, the way that they operate, is drastically different as well, right? So, you know, there's definitely more areas of friction than you would originally expect. And maybe that's a little bit of naivety on my part, but definitely, it's still an ongoing process of discovery, and obviously, working through those challenges together.

27:51 Des Russell  

Absolutely. So, this didn't just happen. If you think about it, you got technology you centred around a customer, we've got the technology partnership, you've got alignment, and goals, alignment on strategy. And then LG, you mentioned that this isn't just about vendors, this isn't just about AWS, Okta, CrowdStrike and Zscaler. It's actually about the power of bringing in the channel and bringing in the partnerships that currently work with customers in solving their particular problem.

Do you want to talk about why is that important? Why won't you just go direct? I mean, Cloud Marketplace, customers can go and buy all of your solutions and why is a channel partner important in this whole equation?

28:49 LG

So, the channel partner to me is the key to success. So, we were calling it the power of five and then perhaps a good follow up from this is we should bring our channel partners into another session of this podcast and see that. But the power of five is about resourcing offers being the specialists. And yes, we do have the integration, we know exactly how it benefits our customers. But in a world that is so busy today, we're all specialists in our own area.

By leveraging our common partner, we're actually leveraging their expertise in how to position these from a customer standpoint, you and I had a chat the other day about translating and how translating means everything. And I think that partner, the system integrator here, has that core expertise, translate all of our specialist knowledge into business language, right and so and communicate that effectively to that particular customer. So, to me, that's been the key. Certainly, the people certainly the initiatives, everything we've planned and everything we'll continue to do, but without the channel partner this, this doesn't scale.

30:03 Reagan Koryozo

Can I just say I love that? It's the first time I've heard you say that, translating even though we all speak English, we can all agree within our own companies we're speaking different languages for an alliance person or channel person is very different language for a salesperson the sales latest? I've never thought of it that way.

30:21 LG

Great question right, try to translate what does that mean for me in terms of my role when we were pooling resources to support us, right. And so, there's, there's so much translation that takes place, but the channel partner can certainly help scale. We actually, we were talking about this yesterday about a customer success story that it was a channel partner that said, here's what zero trust means for this particular customer at this very moment. And so in from that, we were able to all come in and say, all right, let's just narrow the focus to do this now and so that was just amazing.

30:59 Des Russell  

Yeah. So you know, I think, we work with the channel partner who innovates a lot, and there is what's happening in Cloud Marketplace, where all the opportunity is being locked in. And the opportunity for channel partners to be part of its, it is in cloud marketplaces. And there is this myth that, you know, it's destroying the opportunity for channel partners to work with vendors in a way that they are more likely used to work with, which was, you know, let's go and do our account mapping, show me your list, I'll show you, my list. We'll look at where we work together, we look at where we don't work together, we'll go after the whitespace. But the reality is that marketplaces have really, really changed that, and there is a way in which channel partners can work in a marketplace with vendors.

By taking an approach of, I would say, where is the value that we add to this particular equation? So, if I had to say the power of five, I'm assuming that the power of five is the channel partner of power. So that four plus one is really where the opportunity lies there. It was Zscaler who mentioned that you're 100% channel? Justin, where do you see friction with your channel partners in the marketplace?

32:48 Justin McGarr

Not overly I mean, marketplaces are fairly new to Zscaler. And, you know, if I look at the market today, it's very congested, not only from a vendor perspective, but also from a partner perspective, there are countless security partners out there all specializing in what they do. So, if I'm looking at this from a partner lens, what a great way for a partner as a security partner to differentiate themselves. So, you know, not only by coming together with the group here, but to list it on marketplace, which is gaining more and more foot traffic on a regular basis. So, if they can elevate themselves by leveraging, and I call it a new platform, you know, what a way for them to be able to stand out and, and raise questions of okay, right, so this partner has got a zero-trust offering on marketplace. What does that mean? What does that mean for me? Does that mean I've got one throat to choke effectively, to deliver all of these outcomes?

Fantastic. That means I don't have to deal with a partner for this apart for that partner for that it's all under one house. It's all with one person. So how easy is that? That's, that's optimizing my time as optimizing my procurement cycle. Yeah, this is the one I need to go because I don't have enough hours in the day to get everything done.

34:16 Des Russell  

Absolutely and at CrowdStrike, what are you guys seeing?

34:23 James Chung

Yeah, look, AWS Marketplace with that were probably a bit more of a mature partner when it comes to adoption of cloud marketplace. With our partner ecosystem, adoption has been pretty rock solid as well. Obviously, there are going to be some partners who prefer to operate outside of marketplace whereas there are going to be partners who lead with the AWS Marketplace conversation.

But really, when we spoke about being 100% channel, that doesn't mean that our sales team can simply leverage AWS Marketplace and go direct through there for us we don't count that as leading with Channel and being 100% partner led right So for every single AWS Marketplace transaction that we do end up doing, it must also involve a channel resell partner as well. So that's removed quite a lot of the friction and resistance from channel that you typically see around potentially seeing, you know, the threat of resell margin being taken away from them. But at the same time, you know, it's a procurement vehicle at the end of the day, that adds value to the customer gives them better economies of scale.

So, if you put that to the side, you already touched on it, there's, that's, that's out of the way now. So, it's now on the channel partner to add value in different ways, right. And if we look at the most successful channel partners in Region for CrowdStrike, not only are they relatively early and large adopters of AWS Marketplace, but they've got a very broad and diverse and rock-solid services catalogue that they can build around that as well. And many of those partners have also started moving their services onto AWS Marketplace also and that's the cherry on top, I think. From a partner lens, the technology is the enabler for the partner to sell their services. So, you've got that ecosystem, that's a way that they can continue to deliver and maximize there I suppose their profit, their income, by leveraging that ecosystem, that integrated ecosystem.

36:35 Reagan Koryozo

Can I just add that there’s these two gentlemen who have done a fantastic job of answering this question. AWS wants to work with channel partners in the marketplace itself as the marketplace is not there to disrupt or cut out channel partners, it's there to maximize customer value and yourself as a channel partner reseller. I think you should definitely spend time understanding how we're trying to help customers maximize value with marketplace, embed that as part of the way that you sell and options, you can offer a customer. And we're there to work with them, absolutely. And it's built functionally and feature wise to support channel partners. And these partners have done an incredible job at taking that message out to their own channels. And so, we're when we can't scale, right, we AWS, we don't have the scale not to work with channel partners. So, we absolutely want to see you as a partner, professional or a channel partner listen to this as a part of the way we go to market with the marketplace.

37:25 Des Russell

So, in partnerships, results, matter, if we don't get results, we can't get more funding to do the cool stuff that we're trying to do. So, whenever we think about new programs, new alliances, what are the results? So, what are you seeing maybe each of you can just give a view of what a what is the type of impact that you're actually seeing with this alliance.

37:51 LG  

We're seeing strong positive feedback from the customers and the extended partner ecosystem that we've touched upon to bring this up as a solution as a as a go to market motion. We were actually if I can, if I can do a plug in and happy for you, that's to share these on the show notes. We're actually having three customer events coming up in Australia. So that's Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. And we're seeing the number of registrations skyrocket as we started discussing with customers, hey, come alone and understand how partner power by the four of us can help you understand what zero trust means for your business today, but more importantly, ongoing. And that is a question that many customers are going I know I have to comply, but I just don't know what that means. How do I consume this and where do I start?

And so, the offer that we're building in Marketplace is a consultative offer. It's an offer about taking the customer through that journey, and what matters for that particular industry in that market segment. As opposed to here's, catalogue of products you choose which one suits better. Yeah, yeah. And so that’s what we're seeing, great responses and great feedback.

39:16 Des Russell

Okay, it sounds like there's an opportunity that you are calling partners to jump in and jump on. So, do you need more partners to jump in on the zero trust alliance? Do you want more partners and what's the call out to partners?

39:37 LG

So that is a very good question. I think our next steps are we have got a motion that is well establish and we want to see that succeed. The next step for us is to export this in APJ. And with that, we were actually partnering with PartnerElevate to help potential candidates coming in and review.

How do I set this up? As soon as possible? How do I establish a framework, a go to market strategy that helped me get this off the ground and leverage all the learnings in everything we've built, not only in the US, but in an APJ. So, if there are any partners in APJ, that are listening to this, and they want to get in touch, again, this feels free to plug in some of those details. And how on the show notes?

40:27 Des Russell  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're super excited to be able to scale the capability of the zero trust the lines through APJ. So, make sure you look in the show notes for that.

So, we kind of love to end the podcast on the partnerships Fast Five, it's the coolest thing. No one ever does this. No, not really everyone. But it's called the Partnerships Fast Five. It's a really quick answer to a sentence that I start. There are five questions that I'm going to ask.

I'll start with Justin and then we'll go around and each of you can give me a particular answer. And we'll just make sure that there's no right or wrong answers. But you might get a bit of slack if you don't give a good answer.

So here we go. Alliances thrive on…

Justin McGarr

Collaboration.

40:35 Des Russell  

Alliances embody…

James Chung

Cousin's, I'll quickly explain it. It's you're part of an extended family. Okay. Your alliance partners are not your immediate family. They're not your mom, your dad, your siblings, extended family. Each family is slightly different. Got their own goals and aspirations. But sometimes the extended family comes together and works towards something together.

42:31 Des Russell  

Through alliances you can…

Raegan Koryozo

Scale.

42:40 Des Russell

Alliances spark…

LG

Innovation.

42:46 Des Russell  

Alliances succeed through…

42:55 LG  

Well, I want to say cost customers customer satisfaction, right?

42:59 Des Russell  

Love it. So, Partnership Fast Five done.

Justin, James, Reagan and LG. Absolutely having your time has been great gift to our community on the Investable Partnerships podcast. I've had fun. I won't ask where everyone can come and talk to you guys. But I'm assuming LinkedIn to hit the guys up at LinkedIn in the show notes we will have the links to the events that the alliance is putting on over the next couple of months.

And we'll put a link to the Zero Trust Alliance page where you can secure your interest and register your interest with PartnerElevate as well.

So, guys, thank you so much, really appreciate your time and good luck for finishing the year starts in the year and the current sales kick-offs.

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