New Zscaler Partners And Alliances VP Hammond: Partners Who Embrace Services ‘Are Winning’
“Aligning around profitability beyond the sale, whether it's basic deployment services or advanced services that the partner can do, is the way to make a partner profitable,” Ken Hammond told CRN in an interview.
Zscaler’s new vice president of partners and alliances sales says that solution providers transitioning to offer more services to customers is essential for them to improve profitability and stay relevant amid changing customer demand trends.
“Those that are rotating towards that motion are winning,” Ken Hammond (pictured), former Exabeam worldwide channel sales and alliances vice president, told CRN in an interview. “I see that with Optiv. I see that with CDW, with their acquisition of Sirius [Computer Solutions, completed in 2021]. I see the smaller MSSPs that are getting bigger.”
The act of just reselling products to customers is “not the bread and butter anymore” for the channel, Hammond said, echoing comments from other security vendor executives including Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora.
[RELATED: Zscaler CEO Jay Chaudhry: Firewall Vendors ‘Can't Really Do Cost Reduction’]
New Zscaler Partners VP
Hammond just joined San Jose, Calif.-based Zscaler after about seven years with Exabeam, according to his LinkedIn account. He left Exabeam with the title of worldwide channel sales and alliances vice president.
His resume includes about two years with Carbon Black, leaving in 2017 with the title of worldwide channel and alliances sales VP. VMware acquired Carbon Black in 2019.
Zscaler has about 3,000 channel partners worldwide, according to CRN’s 2025 Channel Chiefs. The vendor’s top channel goals for the year include improving partner technical skills, increasing the amount of professional services going through partners and encouraging partners to sell a broader part of the portfolio.
Read on for more of Hammond’s thoughts on the channel and his goals for the year in his new post.
What do you want Zscaler partners to know?
I'm seeing a big transformation in the channel. I’ve been in the channel a long time, but in the last five years, what I tell my team, and when I talk to partners, I say services is the new product.
Aligning around profitability beyond the sale, whether it's basic deployment services or advanced services that the partner can do, is the way to make a partner profitable.
Those that are rotating towards that motion are winning. I see that with Optiv. I see that with CDW, with their acquisition of Sirius. I see the smaller MSSPs that are getting bigger.
The resell is almost part of it but not the bread and butter anymore. And that's what customers want.
I'm looking for that for two reasons. For profitability of partners, because that means they're going to then bring us into deals. And then the retention numbers, which is both good for the partner and for the ISV, are much higher when a partner is in some way managing. It doesn't have to be fully managing. It could be co-managing. It could be just they did the deployment.
If they did something or are doing something in that life cycle, the likelihood that that customer will be satisfied with our product is much, much higher.
That's going to be me [a key part of his new role], is making partners profitable beyond the product sale.
It's the same with the ISVs. Staying still and static is seemingly safe. There is always a sense that … from the ISV’s perspective, we do it better. We know our product better. We know all these things better.
But what the partner brings is, they know the customer's environment better. They don't know just Zscaler. They know what the end point is, the firewall. They know all the different products and the concerns.
So why is it slow? It's the inertia of doing the same thing over and over again instead of looking to the future.
We [at Zscaler] start with the customer. What does the customer want? What's the customer going to want in two years? Three years? Where's the shift going?
The shift is going towards less complexity, more cloud, more services led from partners. I mean, even see the hyperscalers, they're not necessarily wanting to get into and handle all the services. They want to do the transaction, kind of like a new distributor.
But they're expecting partners to step up. There's a big gap there. There's a big scramble. And you're going to see partners emerge that, whether it's in security or data, that were middle players that are going to get really big because they've embraced the services piece. And that just solves what customers want. But any change is a risk.
What should partners know about how you work with the channel?
It's people, not partners.
When we look at the sales data, the [sales pipeline] add, the enablement ... what I see is the 80/20 rule [80 percent of outcomes come from 20 percent of causes]. I see it by partner. But I like to see it by person.
Who's taking our training? I like to see the partner salespeople that we're working with, that we're giving deals, we're getting deals, and stack rank them. The way the ISVs stack rank their best salespeople and techs, I do the same.
I try to move the money, the margin, the effort, to the people doing and making the difference.
The opportunity here is to serve customers well. That's what I'm interested in.
If we enable partners to serve customers well, both before and after the sale, then we're going to have happy customers. We're going to have a mutually profitable business. And so I'm just excited about building on a solid product and extending what Zscaler has already done.
It has a great reputation in the channel. I'm just trying to continue that and extend it and build it so we become even more of a preference out there among these partners that are serving these customers.
I have sold the top three categories now. I've sold endpoint at both Carbon Black and Symantec. I've sold firewalls and VPNs [virtual private networks] at Cisco Security when they established the global security unit there about 10 years ago. And then security management, SIEM.
I'm fair. I believe in clear rules of engagement, and I want them to make money, and it's mutual.
Those long-term relationships between people is what builds a business, not just transactional.
Any advice for Zscaler partners in their customer conversations?
Clarity is important. My degree, back when there used to be newspapers, was newspaper journalism.
We were always taught don't use vocabulary beyond what an eighth grader could understand. So I use that in a way, to be clear.
It's an advantage in tech to be clear, and that's something I see from Zscaler. They're not trying to say the same thing as everyone else.
It's hard to be clear and concise and simple in tech, and we aim to do that so that our partners can spend less time understanding the product and communicating to customers and, instead, more on selling it and adding high-value services to it.
They [customers] are requesting more assistance from partners than they had before, with security products specifically.
You're seeing a multi-partner go-to-market where a customer is not just going to one specific partner for everything. There might be a hyperscaler as part of that.
We team heavily with the hyperscalers. Also with CrowdStrike and others. There's an ecosystem that we're going to market with to satisfy what the customer wants.
Are customers leaning more toward best-of-suite or best-of-breed offers?
It ebbs and flows.
There’s the ‘buy everything from us’ type of ISV. The customers can go for that.
In security, the best product emerges and wins at the end of the day. We might [sales] cycle to throw this product in, throw an endpoint in, throw this, all these different things in some big package license.
For security, since it's so crucial to what customers need to protect, they're always looking for Zscaler. They're always looking for someone that cares about the product first and their safety and security.
In security, best product wins.
Zscalers already see it with our leadership, [it] is what I call ‘win the techs.’ And what I mean by that is, there are so many products … possibly [doing] the same thing, that when Zscaler earns the respect of the technical people, which we have [done] at the top partners in the Americas, then their salespeople will feel more secure introducing Zscaler to yet another new customer. And then that just replicates.
That momentum is there. I intend to push out and make sure that our technical people in our partner community are treated as well or even better than our partner salespeople, because they drive the business as much or more than the partner salespeople.
We want to make sure that they understand the product and get their hands on the product … use the product. And that will continue to be a driver for us.
