Teridion’s New Channel Chief: Public Cloud Sets Us Apart from Aryaka, Cato

Teridion starts where most SD-WAN providers stop, according to the company’s new channel chief.

Kevin Moynahan started his job as director of channel sales for the San Francisco-based SaaS accelerator earlier this year. We spoke to the company’s vice president of global sales last fall as the company was rolling out Teridion for Enterprise channel partner program. Moynahan, who has most recently worked for ShoreTel and 8×8, joined in January to focus exclusively on partners. He told Channel Partners that Teridion’s market strategy goes entirely through the channel.

Teridion’s Kevin Moynahan

Readers should not confuse Teridion with an SD-WAN provider, but the company touches on similar challenges with the value proposition of giving WANs SLA-backed performance through the public cloud. Several SD-WAN vendors, including Cisco Meraki, have partnered with Teridion to improve internet performance.

Moynahan said Teridion is running in its own lane.

“What we do is so unique that it allows our partners to differentiate themselves from the herd of SD-WAN providers,” he said. “By bringing Teridion into the discussion, our partners have instant credibility and trusted-adviser status.

We interviewed Moynahan. We’ve edited the Q&A transcript for length and clarity.

Channel Partners: You’ve worked for 8×8 and ShoreTel. What made you want to leave the UCaaS space for Teridion?

Kevin Moynahan: I had 25-plus years of success in sales and channel in mostly UCaaS-based companies; from analog to digital, from digital to voice-over-IP; from voice to cloud. I’ve managed to identify the emerging technologies, and I’ve tried to stay ahead of that my whole career. Obviously everyone’s moving more and more business-critical apps to the cloud, and I saw Teridion as a way to affect not just the UC component of that but as a way to improve the performance of all those clouds. The more I look at Teridion, I see that Teridion is revolutionizing the way the cloud is going to perform. It also makes sense because I can leverage a lot of the relationships I’ve built throughout that past in the channel, and I thought I could carry those relationships forward. It has been great. I’m even more excited about Teridion and our trajectory.

CP: Tell us a little more about those existing relationships. Are those more on the technology partner or channel partner side?

KM: I would say they’re more on the channel partner side, but certainly there are some technology partner relationships that I’ve been able to leverage. But it’s most important that I’m able to leverage the channel partner side. I think we’ve got a great product team that is nurturing and leveraging their relationships on the technology partner side, so I see that as a strength of Teridion too.

CP: What’s the profile overlap between an 8×8 channel partner and a Teridion channel partner?

KM: There is some overlap. There’s also a new audience. There’s also another world of managed service providers that don’t really do UC; that’s all greenfield for me. That’s where leveraging the technology partners comes in.

CP: What can you tell us about your partner program?

KM: There’s a lot I like about it. One of the main things I like about it is that our go-to-market is 100% through the channel. We are going to succeed with our channel partners. Certainly the source of the greatest acceleration in our channel program has been through our technology partners, like Meraki. We spoke about our relationship with Meraki last month. It is great to have the endorsement of these technology partners. When all of these partners are saying, “Hey. our solutions work better powered by Teridion,” the customers  …