For three days, Zscaler‘s EMEA Partner Community took part in an engagement, training, and networking event in Mallorca; an event that created a lasting impression. It was a fiesta in the truest sense of the word, a celebration with around 130 Zscaler partners in the island’s bright sunshine, with the added opportunity to engage with Zscaler’s senior leadership and channel team.
During the summit, we demonstrated our passion to deliver cloud-based zero trust security to customers. In attendance were representatives of service providers, VARs, system integrators, and distributors, all of whom conveyed the market‘s positive momentum for cloud-delivered security.
As Dali Rajic, Zscaler Chief Operating Officer, expressed in his keynote, market forecasters expect growth in investments in cloud technologies to rise at an above average rate. This is due in part to accelerating digitalization, which enables employees across all industries to work productively from anywhere, as well as efforts to create hybrid work environments. Through our comprehensive Zero Trust Exchange platform, partners can engage customers to address issues that go far beyond security, including the need to digitally transform business operations.
Securing growth opportunities through Zero Trust
The motto "growing together, secured" reflects how partners can secure opportunities and grow their revenue streams through a zero trust platform approach. To this end, Zscaler and partner representatives want to join forces in the sales process. As a result, Zscaler introduced the Zscaler Zero Trust Certified Architect (ZTCA), one of the industry’s most comprehensive zero trust certifications, that helps network and security professionals attest their expertise in establishing a holistic, layered security approach based on zero trust principles.
This was demonstrated in an interview with Banco Sabadell, one of Spain‘s largest financial institutions that operates in 14 countries worldwide and has commercial banks in Spain, the UK and Mexico. In the interview with Ismail Elmas, GVP, International at Zscaler, Marc Segarra López made it clear that the expertise of the partner in the vendor portfolio is of decisive importance for the customer to build trust in the chosen solution approach. "We have to be confident that the partner will have more expert knowledge than ourselves and that they will always suggest the best solutions, architectures and configurations,” said Marc. “We want a partner who joins our entire technology and business journey and that can offer resources, expertise, and services throughout the whole process.”
Empowering partners to transform customer operations
Partner engagement was the focus of the summit to make partners experts in transformation to zero trust-based infrastructure. The flexibility of a cloud approach resonates here: the transformation from a hardware-based security infrastructure to a flexible security service edge (SSE) approach based on zero trust enables companies of all sizes to securely transform to a cloud-based business operation in which employees, workloads, and digital production facilities can be secured with a single, unified platform.
Rather than a complex architeture, this flexible approach provides identity-based access to required applications, workloads, or devices for third parties. In addition, customers have the option of obtaining a flexible licensing model for cloud security services from managed security service providers that offer the necessary agility for business operations.
What’s more, all members of the Zscaler partner and executive teams were thrilled with the opportuntiy to connect with partner representatives face to face. Personal discussions at board-level—for example during a round of golf at the beginning of the summit—not only strengthened relationships, but also enabled the sharing of insights to help deepen partnerships and develop joint go-to-market strategies. Accordingly, there was much praise from the partners for the availability of the entire management team during executive 1-1 sessions, including the ecosystem of technology partners, to further joint sales initiatives around the digital workplace.
Awarding zero trust experts
On the last evening of the event, awards for the partners of the past financial year were presented in a festive setting. Partners were recognized as zero trust experts across eleven categories for their commitment to working together as well as their expertise. The following received Partner of the Year awards:
- EMEA Partner of the Year: Telefonica
- EMEA Service Provider of the Year: Orange Business Services
- EMEA Systems Integrator of the Year: NTT
- EMEA Value Added Reseller of the Year: Softcat
- EMEA International Partner of the Year: Infosys
- EMEA Transformation Partner of the Year: BT
- EMEA North Partner of the Year: HCL
- EMEA South Partner of the Year: Deutsche Telekom
- EMEA Growth Partner of the Year: Sirar by STC
- EMEA Technical Partner of the Year: Xalient
- EMEA Partner Enablement Innovation: Westcon
It was rewarding to see the partner community grow even closer to the Zscaler team over the summit‘s three days. The willingness of both sides to invest in the partnership was clearly felt. Together, we want to advance zero trust for customers and secure sustainable business models with digitization expertise—regardless of company size. Zscaler's message was clear: in Europe, the commitment to partners and the channel is stronger than ever, and it’s set to grow in the coming years.
