Unlocking Opportunity: Zscaler Launches New Partner Specializations
The cybersecurity market in 2025 is more competitive than ever, and partners need every advantage to stand out. Zscaler is tackling this challenge head-on with its new Partner Specializations program, designed to help partners differentiate their expertise, drive revenue growth and deliver greater customer value.
CRNtv host Sydney Neely speaks with John Bullitt, vice president of partner engineering at Zscaler, about how the program gives partners an edge in a fast-evolving security landscape.
Navigating the Challenges of Cybersecurity
Sydney Neely: John, cybersecurity is constantly evolving. What are the biggest challenges partners face when trying to differentiate themselves?
John: Customers are really struggling to get the right level of skilled resources to manage all of their cybersecurity needs, based on their demand and what’s going on in the environment. So, it’s a massive opportunity for our partners. The challenge is that the security environment’s never been more complex.
Not only do we have new threats, but we’ve got new frameworks, we’ve got different paradigms, we’ve got new vendors. You have companies such as Zscaler, where we continue to innovate and add to our platform at a very rapid pace. I’d say the biggest challenge our partners have is where are they going to focus and spend their time because you can’t do everything, you need to pick the right solutions.
At the end of the day, I’m honored that many of these partners have said to us, ‘We believe in Zscaler’s mission. We believe in the products that you guys are representing.’ At the end of the day, we know they’re putting their reputations on the line when they recommend our product set, so we’re really honored to get their support.
Zscaler’s Partner Specializations: What Sets Them Apart?
Sydney Neely: Zscaler recently launched Partner Specializations to help partners address these challenges. What makes this program unique?
John: February 3rd, we launched our first two specializations: Data Security and Digital Experience. We absolutely know that specializations are not a new concept in the industry, but the reason why we decided to go down this route is that we’ve seen a lot of growth and, historically, what we had called the emerging technologies in our platform, data protection, digital experience being examples of those, along with cyberthreat protection, etc.
A lot of our customers, partners and our own internal field teams were asking for ways to better identify the partners that, in addition to knowing the overall platform, have spent additional time to develop deep expertise in these other, more complementary platform services.
So, the framework we’ve got structured allows both sales and delivery specializations at both a company and individual level. Sales is focused on things like opportunity identification, qualification all the way through, technical demos or architecture workshops and proof-of-value services. Delivery builds upon the existing delivery capabilities that many of our partners already have with our Zscaler platform for greater depth and greater expertise on this particular area.
How Partners Can Earn a Specialization
Sydney Neely: What are the requirements for earning a Zscaler Partner Specialization, and how does it benefit partners and customers?
John: In the channel, one of the principles we always have to keep in mind is keep it simple. It’s very easy for programs to kind of spiral into massive amounts of complexity, and we’ve been very cognizant of that.
Our goal in the specialization program was really to follow a straightforward rule I’ll call three by three by three. To get your sales specialization at the company level, you need three account executives and three SEs to go through all the various levels of training in that particular specialization.
To get delivery specialized, you need to take three of your delivery specialized folks that have already gone through core Zscaler service delivery of best practices to go and take the specialization training for those particular specializations.
All of that work unlocks a few different benefits. We talked about joint work with the sales teams on focused campaigns, but increasing professional services revenues in these other areas is a key focus area for us, for our partners and the internal and external awareness, soon to be a launch partner locator tool, is going to be supremely beneficial, as well.
For more information on Zscaler’s Partner Specializations and how they help partners gain a competitive edge in cybersecurity, visit zscaler.com/zscaler-cyber-academy.