Asana’s Path To $1B Includes New Partner Program
‘We all believe at the management level that we can get to $1 billion faster with a really strong partner ecosystem,’ says Eron Sunando, Asana’s channel chief.
Enterprise work management platform vendor Asana has launched a new partner program aimed at growth for new and existing partners, with the first quarter set as the time for launching a new partner portal, new partner tiers and a new partner handbook among other resources.
The San Francisco-based vendor, which has more than 150,000 customers, sees services partners as part of the path to greatly increasing revenue and better helping customers transform business practices in a world that’s embraced remote work and artificial intelligence.
“We want to be a $1 billion company, and we all believe at the management level that we can get to $1 billion faster with a really strong partner ecosystem,” Eron Sunando, Asana’s channel chief, told CRN in an interview. “The momentum is here from a partner perspective. It’s a great time to be a partner with Asana because we are in a growth phase. We are in a building phase. And we’re taking a lot of input from partners. Our partners are part of this build process.”
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New Asana Partner Program
Dan Overgaag, managing director of the business operations practice at Bellevue, Wash.-based Asana partner Spur Reply, told CRN in an interview that Asana’s recently launched AI Studio product is a major opportunity for the solution provider.
Asana launched AI Studio in October. The offer aims to allow users to design workflows and embed AI agents without code and deploy them within Asana. The vendor’s Work Graph unites the types of data needed for better AI actions, according to the vendor.
“What we’re helping them with is making it real in their day to day,” Overgaag said. “Helping them understand the value they can get by implementing AI in some of their different workflows and drive that productivity. Helping customers translate their business using AI as a new feature to do more.”
AI Studio is part of Asana’s evolution from a seat-based pricing model to one that mixes in consumption-based pricing and add-ons. Asana expects AI Studio to become generally available by the end of the first quarter of its 2026 fiscal year.
With AI vendors ranging from Microsoft to Salesforce implementing a variety of different pricing strategies, Asana charges a recurring platform fee including an initial allocation of credits for variable consumption. The initial credits can go toward hundreds or thousands of workflows per month depending on the use case.
Customers save one hour of work for every 1 cent or 5 cents in cost, Asana co-founder and CEO Dustin Moskovitz said on the vendor’s latest quarterly earnings call, held in December.
“What’s especially powerful about our consumption-based model is that revenue potential isn’t tied to seat-based licensing,” Moskovitz said. “We’re finding that just a small number of activated workflow builders can create a large amount of value on their own, in contrast with traditional seat-based models, where we need entire teams on board before we can add a lot of value. This fundamentally changes the economics of customer expansion.”
Asana CFO Sonalee Parekh appeared to endorse more work with partners in the latest earnings call, saying, “We are just starting to scratch the surface with respect to channel-led growth.”
Partner Rewards, Incentives
The new Asana Partner Program includes co-marketing and co-selling support and lead sharing with partners, according to the vendor. Improved resources and training for VARs, MSPs and other partner business models are also part of the new program’s design.
The vendor is launching a high-margin tiering structure that rewards partner engagement and customer retention. Courses, playbooks and guides are options in the Partner Academy. And the vendor is bringing an enhanced tool stack for deal registration and opportunity closure, plus a refreshed partner directory.
Asana partners operate in more than 30 countries, according to the vendor.
In the second half of the year, Asana should have available to partners a marketplace for selling Asana-based applications and custom integrations, Sunando said.
He said the company is seeing strong growth in the health-care and public sector verticals as well as the regions of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and Asia-Pacific and Japan.
“We’re definitely leaning into industry specialization, but also category specialization,” he said. “Looking at workforce transformation or the future of work practices in some of these big GSI and regional SIs.”
During Asana’s latest quarterly earnings call held Dec. 5, the vendor reported $183.9 million in revenue for the third fiscal quarter, ended Oct. 31.
That revenue was a 10 percent increase year over year. Using GAAP, the vendor saw an operating loss of $60.2 million, down 5 percent year over year and representing 33 percent of quarterly revenue. Its GAAP net loss was $57.3 million, down about 7 percent year over year.
For the fourth fiscal quarter, Asana expects revenue between $187.5 million and $188.5 million, 10 percent growth year over year. It expects a non-GAAP operating loss between $5.5 million and $6.5 million with a 3 percent operating loss margin.
For the full fiscal year, Asana predicts revenue between $723 million and $724 million, 11 percent growth year over year. It expects a non-GAAP operating loss between $45 million and $46 million with a 6 percent operating loss margin.
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