At this time last year, I had the privilege of ringing the opening bell at Nasdaq as Zscaler officially became a publicly traded company. While every year at Zscaler has been momentous, full of change and astounding developments, that moment—standing alongside the people who believed in our vision and have been huge supporters and contributors to our success—was the most memorable. When you become a publicly traded company, new responsibilities come with it—more reporting and more regulatory consideration. However, it has allowed us to place added focus and resources on what matters most—our customers. Our culture of customer obsession coupled with our passion and drive for excellence have enabled us to focus on helping our customers securely move to the cloud.
Everything we achieved in the last year has been in pursuit of building a lasting company that would serve customers in the cloud and mobile world. Business Journal ranked Zscaler’s the second-best Silicon Valley IPO of 2018 based on the gain in stock price. As I look back, I realize that we have much to celebrate.
Building a growing community
Steve Jobs said it well: “Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.” The best way to understand what customers need is to spend time with them and, in the last year, we created many opportunities to bring customers together with their peers, Zscaler teams, and industry leaders. We held our first user conferences, Zenith Live Cloud Summit, in Las Vegas and London, and launched Zscaler Academy, an 11-city tour over three months. These events offered hands-on labs, dozens of sessions covering best practices, and customer case studies on how to enable cloud transformation securely.
Expanding our reach
Zscaler is about scalability—it’s right there in our name. In the last year, our customer, employee, and partner community grew in all regions, across Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. We were excited to open a new office in Japan and hired dynamic leaders with in-depth knowledge of the Asia-Pacific market and proven records in customer growth and regional management.
Our CloudOps teams have been hard at work, too. Today, Zscaler has more than 100 data centers on six continents, and we peer with all leading content and service providers, including Office 365, Azure, AWS, Box, and Salesforce. As part of our ongoing cloud expansion, our latest fourth-generation data centers provide multiple-hundred Gbps links for a total capacity exceeding several terabits per second per site.
In December, we achieved FedRAMP authorization for Zscaler Internet Access™-Government (ZIA™-Government), becoming the first secure internet and web gateway solution to earn FedRAMP certification and to satisfy the strict requirements of the recently released Trusted Internet Connection 3.0 Initiative. A few months before that, Zscaler Private Access™ also received FedRAMP authorization as a dedicated remote access platform. Each case was a tremendous milestone that involved an immense team effort.
As the world's largest security platform purpose-built for the cloud, we have reached 65 billion transactions each day. The Zscaler™ cloud blocked 1.7 billion threats hidden in SSL traffic in the second half of the year, which translates to an average of 283 million advanced threats blocked per month! What that means for customers is that they can scan all their traffic, including the high percentage that’s encrypted, and deliver the same protections for all users regardless of location—all without the need for costly, complex security appliances.
New leaders
We added extraordinary talent to the executive leadership team through strategic hires such as Stan Lowe, Global Chief Information Security Officer; Micheline Nijmeh, Chief Marketing Officer; and Kavitha Mariappan, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience and Transformation. These leaders, along with key hires in engineering, product management, sales, customer support, marketing, and sales are propelling Zscaler forward to develop better ways to reach and serve customers.
Customer-focused innovation
Our vision of a world where information can be securely accessed no matter where it lives has never wavered. Thanks to our customers’ input and our engineering teams, we were excited to announce a significant platform release last year that introduced dozens of new features for improved user experience, better security, and enhanced scalability. Some of the most exciting advancements include delivering data protection to all users—on and off the network. We also introduced risk scores and peer comparisons that allow security teams to analyze threats blocked, active infections, and suspicious activity, then compare the results to industry peers.
In August, Zscaler acquired TrustPath, an innovator in AI and machine learning and developer of algorithms to identify new threats. With this technology, we can better detect sophisticated, targeted attacks as they emerge so we can more effectively protect customers.
A culture that rewards customer obsession
The core tenets of Zscaler’s values include Teamwork, Open Communications, Passion, Innovation, and Customer Obsession. We look to hire new employees who embody these values because, as we grow, we need to retain the culture that has fueled our success. Last month, we were proud to learn that Zscaler was named one of The Best Cloud Computing Companies And CEOS to Work For in 2019 Based on Glassdoor. I want to thank our smart, passionate, hardworking employees who helped us earn this special recognition.
Recognition
We are proud that Gartner named Zscaler a leader in the Secure Web Gateways Magic Quadrant for the eighth consecutive year. An accomplishment on its own. In addition, we were recognized for our innovation, growth, and customer success with awards that included CRN's Security 100 list, Cloud Computing Insider Reader's Choice IT Award, Cyber Breakthrough Awards, and Deloitte Fast 500 Awards. Recently, I was honored to receive the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) Decade of Vision Leadership award, along with Phil Dunkelberger, CEO of Nok Nok Labs, and Philippe Courtot, CEO of Qualys. We were recognized for our support of the CSA’s mission and our commitment to defining and raising awareness of best practices to help ensure a secure cloud computing environment.
Our success in our first year as a public company is due to the thousands of organizations that have placed their trust in us. The entire Zscaler organization is grateful for that trust and will strive to earn it every day. We have much to celebrate following a year of remarkable milestones and successes. I can’t wait to see what we will have achieved one year from today.
So for now, we will simply get back to work, because there is much more to do.
