Sysdig CRO on how the partner ecosystem will help them hit $1bn

Gary Olson at the cloud security company told CRN Australia how a revamped go-to-strategy will put them on the journey to the billion dollar club.

Cloud security platform Sysdig has aims to be a billion dollar company and has revamped its go-to strategy to do so.

Gary Olson, CRO, Sysdig spoke to CRN Australia at its recent Accelerate ‘25 event about how the company is “customer first, partner always”.

Olson noted that Sysdig is a 100 percent channel company.

“We have completely revamped our go to market with channel. We now look at as the ecosystem is the only way that we're going to scale,” Olson explained.

“My job as a CRO is obviously predictable and repeatable. Our goal is to be a billion dollar plus ARR company. Our goal is to go public or get consumed by some large organisation like some of our competitors have done recently.”

Looking at the regions that are helping Sysdig reach that goal, Olson singled out the APJ region.

“APJ is our biggest growth engine,” he explained. “I look at our new business year over year, for many years, Gavin [Selkirk] and team have done a great job opening up all the markets.”

Travelling across the region, with Gavin Selkirk, VP and general manager APJ, they identified the number one theme across the board being “channel is the enabler”.

“It is the force multiplier. If I look at EMEA and AMEA, comparatively, we've got a lot of work to do,” Olson said.

“EMEA is probably second, AMEA we're definitely on a nice upward trajectory up to the up to the top.”

APJ strategy

Selkirk at Sysdig has a “double double” strategy for APJ where he wants to double the business and then double the business again.

“[The C-suite] came in and mandated that we had to narrow our focus in terms of the channel, and that meant limiting it to 10 partners per geo,” he explained.

“Now, of course, when you've got two tier distribution and that obviously gives you a wider reach.”

Selkirk said several of his staff and colleagues were troubled and concerned by that goal.

“In actuality, how that's been received by the people that are in that considered set, given we know that we need to help them make money, to help us make money, that was probably one of the most significant moves that he drove into the business, and I think it's going to work,” he added.

Sysdig’s first priority is the US, the second is APJ, according to Selkirk.

"We were later to market here, which is why we've got the double double strategy, doubling our business every two years,” he said. "

We're kind of lucky that we started later, because when you do that, you can take a lot of the learnings from the other two monster regions.

He said from those learnings they have a win rate of up to 80 percent in the APJ region.

“I’ve been In some pretty damn good businesses, I have never come across a win rate like that,” Selkirk explained.

“I don't espouse those data points when it comes to posture. I like that our business has rapidly been moving towards getting a feature parity posture product. Let's call it for what it is the number one out there, which is wiz you want to be number one or number two?

“We're clearly number one in CWP. Our partners know that, when you add all of that in together, we've been really fortunate in terms of our partner go to market,” he said.