With 2022 arriving, I am so excited to be taking over as Country Manager for Netskope in Canada.

I’ve been here since the start of our Canadian team and have watched it grow in the more than five years I’ve been with Netskope. Just in the last 18 months, we’ve expanded rapidly, increasing our Canadian coverage six-fold. Along with this team growth has been the expansion of Netskope’s technology footprint across the territory. First came our data center in Toronto, then one in Montreal, and another in Vancouver, with more on the way as part of Netskope’s ongoing, global expansion of our NewEdge network.

The channel has been critical to our rapid growth in Canada, and that’s because we’ve been partner-centric from our first day.

I receive at least two phone calls a week from major partners in Canada saying, “Hey, we want to sign up with Netskope.” The Canadian partner community—and globally for that matter—recognize that Netskope’s products and capabilities are very strategic to their business. That’s why so many partners want to sign on with Netskope or – for our existing partners – they are going all in on the Netskope partnership. With the combination of this buy-in and the relationships we’ve built, my team here in Canada —and our partners—enjoy some of the highest customer renewal rates across the company.

One of the biggest drivers we are seeing is the rise of Security Service Edge (SSE) as part of an overall journey to a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture. We have a joint opportunity with our partners to lead the way in educating the market about SSE and SASE. This profound evolution of cloud, data, and network security is converging several security technologies, including cloud access security broker (CASB), secure web gateway (SWG), and zero trust network access (ZTNA). This represents a tremendous market impact, and here at Netskope we are enabling our partners to profit from it like no other vendor in the market.

My philosophy has always been that people buy from people. Customers are going to buy from you because of who you are and what you stand for. Everyone on my team, myself included, is focused on how we can help our customers and partners. And that starts with engagement. Our ability to build strong relationships with customers and in the channel is only going to help us grow more.

Being a part of this growth, and watching it happen from the start, with such a tight knit team, really gives me confidence in Netskope’s future here in Canada. I can’t wait to keep helping it grow alongside our partners! If you’d like to learn more about how we’re growing Netskope in Canada, I’d love to connect on LinkedIn. There’s also a great SSE overview on our blog, and of course organizations can apply to become a partner or login to the Netskope Partner Portal for more resources.