Johann Ramchandra Proofpoint’s ANZ channel director on the new partner program, AI governance and his new role

Ramchandra wants to find “new and exciting” ways to do the traditional jobs with their partners.

Johann Ramchandra was hired earlier this year as Proofpoint’s first ANZ channel director and first and foremost he has an “ambitious” growth goal for this year.

He spoke to CRN Australia exclusively saying he has ambitious growth goals for Proofpoint’s partners.

“If we can get there, that's a big achievement for us as a team,” he said.

Ramchandra noted that Proofpoint wants to be able to provide a vision around where the industry is going.

“We like to think that we're on the forefront of where the industry is going as cybersecurity vendors,” he said.

“With the investments that we're making around AI. Finding new, exciting ways to do the traditional jobs that we've done with our partners, perhaps even augmenting it with AI as well, as a bit of a fun pet project for me as well.”

Read more of the conversation between CRN Australia and Johann Ramchandra below.

CRN: What fun things are you wanting to do with AI and partners?

Johann Ramchandra: Think about the traditional job of the channel account manager, in trying to coordinate sort of three macro things, sales hustle, creating integrated service offerings with our partners, and then jointly marketing together.

We're using AI to help us in that journey. Whether it's providing partners with very targeted and specific tooling to help them in their prospecting or help them advance deals using a lot of research that our AI tooling can provide for us to understand their client requirements.

Whether it's meshing together the spending habits about our customers, to better understand how we can add value to their spending. Even trying to find leverage through the hyperscalers, Microsoft and AWS, using some other tooling that we have as well. Everyone's doing it, but we want to try and com at traditional problems with new ways of trying to solve them.

CRN: Why are you moving into AI governance and data security?

Ramchandra: AI adoption is real. There's no doubting that. AI doesn't fit the mold of what would otherwise have been a network problem or perhaps an endpoint problem. Thinking about how we go forward and in a secure way, we need to think about, what is this new category of protecting AI? The way it's going right now is that every source of information, data and assets that may exist out there are potentially being aggregated by an enterprise's AI. We're potentially empowering those models, to make decisions, analyse and then present back something to the user that initiated it.

Our CEO talks about this conundrum, there is no compass, and so the only way to go about proceeding safely is we need to think about behaviour. Proofpoint for years gone by has been in this business of human behaviour and having this human centric approach to securing organisations. As we're extending into that AI sphere, we're looking at it from the perspective of human and AI behaviour and intent and securing all of that.

CRN: Are you having more conversations about data sovereignty with your partners?

Ramchandra: We have a strong approach around ensuring that all of our tech certainly is meeting needs of those sovereign requirements. We've made some serious investments around local data centres and ensuring that they're even certified to RF standards and the like as well.

As we think about our own house being an order that's certainly been a focus in the last few years. In terms of the other aspect of sovereignty pertaining to AI, we're seeing a tremendous amount of homegrown AI factories being placed in country. We've seen, tremendous amount of investment in their centre space and our local DC providers are doing quite well out of this as well. Certainly something that is front of mind for us and making sure that we're providing security, but with sovereignty in mind.

CRN: Proofpoint has new deal protections and incentives in its partner program, what does this mean for Aussie partners?

Ramchandra: We went out there last year, did a ton of research with our partners across the globe, and have been brought about some exciting changes. In a nutshell, we've added another tier of partner now we're calling it the elite plus tier. For our Australian partners that are in that tier, and we have a few of them, there's some pretty serious benefits that we've brought about for them in the form of rebates, as well as from a deal protection perspective.

Now that we have a best-in-class deal reg program now, and it's well aligned to three things, sourcing business, co-selling, and providing renewal incumbency and being clear about all those three things. Our partners have provided us with some pretty good feedback around that now.

From a requirements perspective, we've put some thought into what are we asking our partners to do in order to qualify for these things. We were talking internally the other week, and I made a statement that we're not going to ask our partners to do a single cert this year that isn't directly tied to their ability to then deliver, manage or ultimately increase their customer coverage with us.

We're getting out of that sort of conundrum that some vendors fall into in terms of having lots of certs that aren't necessarily tied to ultimately differentiation and profitability, which is what partners want. Giving that a bit of a facelift there as well.

CRN: What do you want your partners to get out of this new partner program?

Ramchandra: We grow our businesses together in line with the expectations that individual companies have, we want to be able to take this assessment led approach to opportunities going forward. Being able to provide our clients through our partners, an assessment of their current state, whether it's relating to their AI posture, their data security posture or their collaboration security posture. Being able to go in there and consultative way, but use the tooling that we have to provide that assessment. And make it so that the customer can make an informed decision about how they look at the risks surrounding those things. And go forward and provide both combination of tech services as well as human services there. If we can get that right, that's one thing we're looking at.

There are other aspects to the program that we want to look at success for this year. I talked about like the operational services and the delivery services piece, we are eager to have more of that in country.

We've already got a number of services partners that are they're investing. If we nail our plans in terms of growth and expansion this year, we need a lot more coverage from a service perspective with our partners, and our default is for partners to provide services for Proofpoint.

CRN: You’ve stepped into the new ANZ channel director role, what are you excited about and what do you hope to achieve?

Ramchandra: Excited that we established set of partnerships that, I think, you know, sort of second to none. We've got a good partner community in country already, and they're leaning in, they're investing as it relates to our core. And there's a good appetite, I think, that we're seeing from them around investing further into these, these new areas of focus for proof point now. Having that foundation and having that from our partner community already is tremendous to me. I’m grateful for that.

What I'm excited about is that expansion into what else we're now doing for our customers, with our partners, and this intentional move that we've made into the data security space, as well as now the AI governance space, which is such an exciting place to be.

As I think about what partners doing, customers are very much looking at making increased investments in these spaces. AI is the exponential path to exponential productivity for the for themselves. Partners are playing such a big role in terms of not just advising the art of what's possible there, but also then providing those guardrails for doing that in a safe manner.

CRN: What is your message to partners?

Ramchandra: They can expect that we'll continue to invest in partners that will invest back in us in return. Expect predictability from us like we're not going to falter from the program that we put so much work into. Our entire team, all 100 practitioners in Australia are behind the program, which is great.

We're 100 percent channel, of course. We want to think about other ways to go to market this year as well. Marketplaces and the hyperscaler route is something that we are very keen to do more with.

The services piece is very, very near and dear to my heart. More and more work we can do there is going to be better for all involved, pre, during and post.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.