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Zscaler is accelerating its APAC and Japan regional presence with the appointment of Foad Farrokhnia as senior director and leader for APJ Channels and Alliances.
The Singapore-based appointment comes after the company recently announced it had delivered outstanding results for the first quarter of 2022, with year-over-year revenue growth accelerating to US$230.5 million, an increase of 62 per cent year-over-year. Zscaler has also officially surpassed US$1 billion in annual recurring revenues, with the company focused now on achieving US$5 billion in annual recurring revenues.
Formerly head of channels for Zscaler in Australia and New Zealand and based in Melbourne since mid-2020, Farrokhnia has been a key catalyst in Zscaler’s ANZ channel business momentum. During that time, he has also forged strong executive engagement and mindshare with key service providers in the region.
In his new regional role, Farrokhnia will relocate from Melbourne to Singapore to further develop and mature the Zscaler channel in line with the company’s growth strategies across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region. He will also be responsible for growing mutually successful relationships between Zscaler and its broad ecosystem of regional alliance partners, global and local managed service providers, value-added resellers, and tier-1 systems integrators to help them sell, deploy and service Zscaler’s cloud cyber threat security solutions.
Over the past 18 months, Farrokhnia has been instrumental in ramping up executive partner engagement through existing networks and accelerated certification. At the same time, he launched Australia and New Zealand’s first Professional Services Program, signed on The Instillery Group as a value-added reseller partner in New Zealand, and appointed Orca Tech as the company’s first national distributor to accelerate commercial business momentum.
According to Arun Dharmalingam, VP, EMEA & APJ Alliances, Zscaler, it is Farrokhnia's proven track record of scaling and overseeing successful channel sales and partner organisations that led to the executive appointment.
"During the past year, he has expanded Zscaler’s sales capacity to enable our alliance partners to achieve their full potential at a time when end users' customers are increasingly deploying a zero-trust architecture to defend their businesses against increased cyber threats and to accelerate digital transformation initiatives.
“In addition, Foad has demonstrated consistent leadership capabilities, been relentless in his engagement with partners to foster sales growth in the ANZ market and was key to the sales teams’ success in the region.
"His well-deserved promotion is part of our long-term strategy to build out a regional leadership team that represents not only the best talent in the cyber security industry but also the team we believe can take the company to the next level,” Dharmalingam said.
Farrokhnia has two decades of experience working in the enterprise IT and telecommunications industry across business development, client management, consulting and sales enablement programs.
Before joining Zscaler in 2020, Farrokhnia worked at Telstra in Australia and North America where he built and drove strategic transformation and enablement programs in several key leadership positions.
Working closely with the Zscaler regional team for the past year, has set a strong foundation for Farrokhnia in his new role.
"I am excited now to work with our talented channel and alliance partners throughout the region to help companies transform their security posture with the Zscaler zero trust architecture and to reach their full potential,” Farrokhnia added.
Globally, channel partners accounted for 94 percent, or US$632.4 million, of Zscaler’s revenue in the fiscal year ended 31 July 2021.
Last month, Zscaler also announced significant enhancements to Zscaler Digital Experience (ZDX), with new Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) application monitoring, visibility into zero trust secured private apps and digital workflow service integrations that are designed to automatically pinpoint and quickly remediate performance issues for improved employee collaboration and productivity.
Delivered as an integrated service on Zscaler’s cloud native Zero Trust Exchange, ZDX aims to address the three most significant challenges that prevent seamless collaboration for the hybrid workforce: siloed user data, limited legacy monitoring tools and a lack of analytics and workflows that can optimise and improve the productivity and digital experience for employees no matter where they reside.
[Related: Cyber attackers targeted IT and communication industries the most in 2021]
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