For Asana Partners, Channel Chief Sunando Says ‘The Momentum Is Here’

‘Our partners are part of this build process,’ says Eron Sunando, Asana’s channel chief.

Eron Sunando, Asana’s channel chief, told CRN in an interview that the vendor’s efforts to grow its partner program could give solution providers new opportunities around integration work, the recently launched Asana AI Studio and a growing customer base in health care and the public sector.

“The momentum is here from a partner perspective,” said Sunando, whose official title with the San Francisco-based enterprise work management platform vendor is global head of channels and alliances. “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.”

Approaching his first anniversary with the company in March, Sunando is marking the cumulation of his year’s work with a series of partner program changes set to go live in the first quarter. A new partner portal, new partner tiers and a new partner handbook are among the new resources in the vendor’s partner push.

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New Asana Partner Program

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.

Dan Overgaag, managing director of the business operations practice at Bellevue, Wash.-based Asana partner Spur Reply, told CRN in an interview that helping customers adopt Asana AI Studio and prepare their companies for the AI era continues to be a major opportunity.

“Helping customers kind of think through, what does AI mean to you … that was a lot of 2024,” Overgaag said. “We’ll see more adoption and customers looking to embed it in different ways in 2025 now that it’s become a little more mainstream, now that more and more solutions have it embedded.”

Before joining Asana, Sunando worked at Conversica for about two years, leaving in 2024 with the title of CRO, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes about six years with Salesforce, leaving in 2022 with the title of vice president of growth and strategy for the vendor’s Commerce Cloud, and about three years with DXC Technology, leaving in 2016 with the title of industry general manager for the insurance vertical.

Here’s what else Sunando had to say.

Why is Asana investing in its partner program?

One of the things that was a really clear opportunity was the fact that, as much as we love it, the world really doesn’t live in Asana. Most knowledge workers have to deal with eight, nine, 10 different applications. The software world for the knowledge workers is very fragmented.

The ability to build a narrative around building better integrations, better experiences, better collaboration with partners [is key]. Because certainly our customers don’t want to be their own system integrators. They buy Asana.

For most large enterprises, there are a lot of things to consider around data, cleanliness, workflows, migrations, automations, integrations. And it’s a great opportunity to build some of that with existing partners as well as recruit new partners who kind of bring a very different skill set in a brand-new, challenging world.

It’s a big move and investment from the company. We are all committed to making channels and partners a really core part of nonlinear growth for the company.

We are not yet a $1 billion company. 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.

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.

We’ve launched new things like Partner Summit. We are about to launch a Partner Advisory Board.

AI text. Artificial Intelligence digital concept. chatbot assistant. AI chatbot. AI chatbot digital concepts What are some opportunities in 2025 for Asana partners?

If you’re a CEO of a company, regardless of what’s happening, AI or non-AI, the business problems haven’t changed.

CEOs are out there thinking about, ‘How do I launch products faster? How do I react better and faster to macroeconomic or regulatory changes? How do I make sure our employees are productive? How do I retain and recruit the best talent? How do I run faster than my competitors?’

The wind in our sails is work still has to get done. The question now is, in a post-pandemic world and with a new generation of knowledge workers, how do we ensure that work gets done better, faster, more friendlier—moving away from the world of rows and columns—and have people basically be able to communicate, collaborate and get stuff done faster?

And also allow visibility at the senior levels to see things in a much more clear sense, and then have infused AI then take that 2X, 3X more, which is what we’re doing with our AI strategy. At the center of our AI strategy is all about transforming the way people work.

What should partners know about the recently announced Asana AI Studio?

[AI Studio] is an ability for every customer to almost create and design their AI teammate.

Most of the AI out there is purpose-built to do one or two things, basically. But the ability to say, ‘You have a different challenge in your [job] day to day. I have a different challenge. We should have the ability to build or have an AI team. And it helps us solve some of the mundane … challenges based on our roles.’ That's what I’m excited about with this AI Studio that we’ve launched.

It has a lot of momentum. But it also requires a lot of thinking and design. It is no-code. But it does take some thinking: What do you want the AI to do? Who actually gets to be part of this workflow? Who gets to approve the workflow? What reference data does the AI look up to?

There is a lot of thinking behind that. Partners, consultants, service providers will definitely be able to kind of provide a lot of value to our customers who are interested because you can’t just buy AI and say, ‘Let's just turn it on and this thing’s going to happen.’

Most of the customers I work with, they already have day jobs. It’s not their day job to learn AI and large language models and what’s the difference between OpenAI or Anthropic or somebody else’s large language models.

Our AI Studio product is definitely a differentiator as is our ability to partner and integrate with others as opposed to building it on our own right. Those are two big competitive advantages.

We’ve been talking a lot about deepening partnerships with different companies like Miro or Zoom or PageProof.

We are an open ecosystem. We can build this on any CRM, whether you’re on Salesforce or you are on HubSpot.

Inserting image... How is Asana investing in its partner program?

Our existing partner program is good, but it’s very basic.

Our solution partners who sell our products all get discounts. What we’re trying to build in the new partner program is more tiering.

The good partners will get more. They get more benefits … whether it’s discounts from a selling perspective or access to early product beta-testing. Early access to some of our bigger deals and service opportunities.

Because of the complexity of data and AI and workflows out there, there is an opportunity to bring a bigger, different type of partner as well, like the GSIs.

They bring a different value because they’re not just about Asana. They’re like, ‘Let’s look at your ecosystem, of which Asana is going to be part of.’

What key dates should partners and prospective partners keep in mind?

We surveyed all the existing partners, and we had responses around … ‘We want better access to data so we can support our customers on our own. We want better sales and marketing, training and assets. We want the ability to connect with your teams in a more seamless way.’

We’ve been busy, I would say, in the last eight months. Building tooling infrastructure. We’re going to launch our bran-new partner portal in Q1. We're going to put in brand new … tiering. A brand-new partner handbook. All of this is going to come out in Q1.

In the second half of this year, we have very strong aspirations to have our own marketplace. A lot of our partners have built applications on top of Asana. They’ve built custom integrations between, let’s say, Asana and [digital collaboration platform] Miro.

I would love to create a marketplace for them to start putting this up and make some money out of their innovation.

Does Asana work with distributors?

In certain sectors like state government, public sector, we do work with distributors and resellers like SHI, Carahsoft.

Amazon is a big partner for us. We run our technology on AWS and we see a lot of momentum of enterprise customers purchasing, consolidating software through marketplaces because they have all these extra AWS credits that they’re not consuming to buy software from the marketplace.

And also reducing friction from a procurement and finance [perspective] through the resellers. We are definitely doubling down on those relationships.

We have a lot of momentum in particular in our health-care as well as public sector business. We’ve made commitments to be FedRamp [Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program]-compliant.

We want to grow our international business as well. Both EMEA as well as Asia \-Pacific and Japan. There’s a lot of work transformation opportunities there.

We’re definitely leaning into industry specialization, but also category specialization. Looking at workforce transformation or the future of work practices in some of these big GSI and regional SIs.

Why is Asana making these channel investments now?

It could be a very lucrative business for many service partners to come in and help customers transform the way they work. Because we just cannot work the same way. The world is moving so much faster. And the need for us to access data to make decisions has never been greater.

There are a lot of opportunities for service partners to just look at redesigning the way people work and have Asana at the core of that.

But then you need all of the surrounding applications, integrations and transformation thinking around that. There’s plenty, plenty of business to get from this.

At the core of Asana is something called the Work Graph. … The same work being collaborated on by 300 people. You’re not creating copies of the same work in different places. You’re not worried about version control.

We mine this data and look at, how could you actually be better? Change the way your organization is shaped and put in new processes or get rid of processes based on different departments?

Using the Work Graph, you can graphically see over time why marketing is on their own when we want them to work closely with product and engineering.

If you’re a service provider, you can take this data and actually have a CEO-level conversation around insights-driven transformation that says, ‘Based on the data that’s in Asana, there are opportunities for your company to actually change the way you work, not only at the department level, not only at the task or project level, but at the organization level.’

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