Jon Kane, Channel and Alliances Director EMEA, explains how Gigamon’s extensive industry experience enables channel success in 2023 and beyond.
How will your extensive industry experience help you in your new role?
I’ve always found the channel community incredibly interesting and a key partner for both vendors and customers; there’s no better environment to work in, in terms of understanding the technology ecosystem from service provider to end-user.
I’ve also spent most of my career working in the security space, helping secure organisations and advising on how to get ahead of threat actors which is so vital in today’s risk landscape. And while I started my channel career working on the distribution side of the market, I’ve since worked with MSSPs and GSIs – this experience enables me to understand how Gigamon and our deep observability pipeline can best support security and drive compliance for those on the frontline.
What do you expect to be your channel focus for 2023?
In my first eight weeks with Gigamon, I travelled to every region within our EMEA channel reach (as well as the US) to meet the team, identify what’s working and uncover opportunities for growth. While each region obviously has different areas of focus, the over-arching priority this year will be looking at how Gigamon supports the channel with ensuring end-user budgets go further in this tough economic climate.
In short, we’re focusing on how our solutions can optimise what’s already in place across a channel customer’s tech stack, therefore reducing their IT complexity and highlighting where cloud to core blind spots can be eradicated to improve security.
What can your customers and channel partners expect from your company in the year ahead?
In 2023, the channel will be looking to vendors for technology that integrates and improves, rather than solutions that only work in siloes and therefore do not provide added value to other systems. The channel will also be relying on vendors to support them through education, training and messaging to ensure the customer gets the best product and the best service.
To make this possible, this year is all about enablement. A big focus for us is looking at how we can support our partners and become reliable, trusted advisors while also helping them stand out from their competitors.
We can say we’re dedicated to working closely with the channel across EMEA specifically to enable end-users to do more for less, but if we truly want to help end-users stay secure while also making their budgets go further, we need to help our partners understand where we, as Gigamon, bridge the gap and what we do differently from others in the market.
How do you intend to support partner enablement across the region?
There are ultimately two key parts to enablement. The first is commercial: making sure the channel never misses an opportunity by ensuring they recognise how Gigamon can act integrate, optimise and work alongside other solutions.
The second is making sure our partners are always armed with the technical insights necessary to make the most out of every opportunity. And then, following that, enable a positive and continuous relationship with end-users looking to further improve their security, reduce complexity and control IT spend.
What benefits will your channel partners be able to bring to their customers in the new year?
To truly and holistically support their customers, channel partners must get to know them, understand their needs and help them find a combination of solutions that can provide great value while optimising their digital infrastructure, enabling Digital Transformation and reducing total cost of ownership.
At Gigamon, we work with over 200 different vendors; we’re platform agnostic and don’t just sell a siloed product. Instead, we work on any network and will optimise products that customers already have in place. These benefits are crucial in a time of intense budget scrutiny and economic pressures.
Do you have a strategy for bolstering the Gigamon channel team?
One reason I joined the team is Gigamon’s channel-first strategy. After we pivoted to this over two years ago, our channel business grew significantly and we increased our global channel revenue contribution to over 50% last year. Alongside continuing with our channel-first approach, we’re also building out the ‘OneGigamon’ team of channel managers, recruiting in various regions and ensuring we spend time with the local teams; we want to speak to partners across the EMEA space, to find out how we can further collaborate and enable them in the year ahead.
How will you educate the channel on the benefits and return on investment from Gigamon solutions for cloud and network security?
The unexpected, spiralling costs of cloud have been a significant stumbling block for end-user Digital Transformation. Enterprises are shifting more and more workloads to the cloud, yet as they do, they’re faced with extra complexity and unforeseen spend. It’s important that we can support and educate the channel on why this is an issue and, most crucially, how this can be tackled.
The key has to be achieving deeper observability across the whole IT environment – core and cloud – to identify where any bottlenecks or blind spots exist and remediate these issues quickly. And it’s our role to ensure the channel recognises the value of Gigamon for doing just that with our deep observability pipeline.
How can you build on Gigamon’s reputation for deep observability?
The beauty of deep observability is that your data can exist on-premises, in a data centre, or in the public, private, multi or hybrid cloud environment – the holistic visibility works in the same way across any infrastructure and therefore acts as a reliable source of truth. For IT teams, this ‘single pane of glass’ view into all moving data is critical for reducing the risk of network outages or data breaches, particularly pertinent in a hybrid world where tools designed for on-prem infrastructure lack the insight critical for virtual environments.
At Gigamon, we have an exciting opportunity to continue leading innovation and growing the deep observability market. We are already recognised at the top vendor in deep observability, with a 68% market share in a space forecasted to reach US$2 Billion by 2026.
In 2023, we will be focusing on building awareness of the benefits of deep observability in the channel and becoming trusted advisors for our partners. We want to ensure everyone across the channel – from MSSPs to distributors – understands the value of deep observability for empowering IT teams and realising the true transformational promise of the cloud.
Why is deep observability increasingly recognised as a priority at the board level?
You can’t manage, optimise or protect what you can’t see, which is why holistic visibility achieved with deep observability is so critical. The good news is that boardrooms are waking up to this fact, with 78% of global IT and security leaders agreeing that deep observability is now discussed by their execs.
Cybersecurity and ransomware are also now key topics for executives, as is how enterprises can do more for less in a time of economic challenges. Which is ultimately why we’re seeing deep observability as a topic in these boardroom discussions. This pipeline is invaluable for uncovering inefficiencies or behavioural anomalies in data that may have otherwise been missed. In turn, budgets can go further while security improves, so it’s a no-brainer for business leaders.
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