Cloud security company Zscaler just hired John Tavares as its new vice president of partners and alliances.

In his new role, Tavares will be instrumental in accelerating Zscaler’s growth, helping partners increase profit, and expanding the company’s market share.

Tavares has more than 25 years of experience creating global partnerships in the software, SaaS and IT markets. Prior to joining Zscaler, he was the global channel chief at Commvault. In addition, he held a variety of sales leadership, go-to-market (GTM) and strategy roles at Dell EMC. He grew that company’s data center business, built a sales team and continuously increased revenue.

Zscaler’s John Tavares

“Throughout my career, the most energizing and defining times have centered around working with customers on transformation,” Tavares said. “When I talk to Zscaler customers and partners, it is very clear that Zscaler is delivering impactful business outcomes through secure digital transformation. Ultimately, Zscaler’s focus on customers and partners, combined with technology leadership, made it the clear choice for the next chapter in my career.”

Previous Experience Provides ‘Great Foundation’ for New Role

Tavares said EMC, Dell EMC and Commvault provided a “great foundation” in three areas.

“First, spending 22 years at EMC provided world-class sales, sales leadership and partner GTM experience,” he said. “We built a hypergrowth business from almost zero to over $3 billion, all through our partners. At the time, this was a new motion for EMC. Second, Dell EMC built on this foundation with increased operational command, velocity and reach. And Commvault provided me partner strategy, board alignment [and] global expertise. And I was lucky to have an incredible mentor there — Edison Peres, who was John Chamber’s global channel chief at Cisco. This previous experience gives me the unique advantage to connect our partners, our partner organization and sales together in a collaborative sales motion for our customers.”

Zscaler has built a strong channel strategy and partner program, Tavares said.

“This year, the program has evolved with a focus on making Zscaler easier to do business with, for partners to be more profitable and for them to be more involved with our product lifecycle at every stage,” he said. “In my view, partner programs are always evolving. The key is that they evolve with partner feedback.”

Listening Most Important

Tavares said listening to partners, the partner team and customers is his top priority for his first 30 days on the Zscaler channel leadership team.

“I learned early on that the only way to build excellence is through listening,” he said. “The best ideas come from partners, our sales team and our partner organization.”

The biggest challenge facing partners is always change, Tavares said. And change is more challenging when it happens rapidly.

“Zscaler and its partner ecosystem is growing at over 60% year over year,” he said. “And we are doing this at scale having just passed the $1 billion annual recurring revenue (ARR) milestone. Ultimately, the pain point is moving from a legacy security and network sales motion to a business outcome-based transformational sales motion. To address this, we are very focused on investing in partner enablement and extending our tools to our partner ecosystem.”

New Zscaler Data Loss Report

Meantime, Zscaler’s ThreatLabz research team has released its annual data loss report. It analyzed nearly 6 billion data loss policy violations from November 2021-July 2022.

Among the findings:

New Data Protection Innovations

To address these, Zscaler has unveiled new data protection innovations. The new advancements accelerate data protection programs from months to hours with zero configuration for data loss prevention (DLP). This mitigates security risks by unifying data protection across all channels, simplifying operations by automating workflows.

Moinul Khan is Zscaler’s vice president and general manager of data protection.

“Building on eight years of data protection innovations, Zscaler has employed advanced auto-classification capabilities to accelerate setup and reduce security team overhead and costs,” he said. “Unlike other data protection solutions, this ensures that Zscaler data protection works for the IT administrator, rather than having the IT administrator work for it. In addition, the technology we acquired from the recently announced ShiftRight acquisition allows organizations to manage hundreds of potential risks and incidents in a simple, yet very sophisticated way to reduce case resolution time significantly.”