Zero Networks goes all-in on the channel, and why Canadian partners should pay attention

Robert Dutt: Hello and welcome to In The Channel from ChannelBuzz.ca, bringing news and information to the Canadian IT channel community for the last 16 years. I’m Robert Dutt, editor of ChannelBuzz.ca, and as always your host for the show.

Microsegmentation has been on a lot of security roadmaps for a while now, but for many MSPs and solution providers, it still felt like something that lives in the enterprise world. Complex to deploy, hard to explain to customers, not always clear where the recurring revenue opportunity is. Zero Networks is looking to change that, and they’re making a big bet on their channel to do it. The company recently went full channel first with an updated partner program called Zero to Sixty, reported 45% year-over-year revenue growth through MSP partners, and earned the only five-star rating in Gartner’s 2026 Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for microsegmentation. Joining me today to talk about all of this is Adam Hofeler, vice president of go-to-market strategy at Zero Networks. We’re going to dig into what the channel first shift really means in practice, where Canadian partners fit into Zero Networks’ plans, and why the conversation around containment and identity segmentation may be more relevant to your next customer meeting than you think. Adam, thanks for taking the time. I appreciate it.

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, good to see you, Robert.

Robert Dutt: Your team recently published research that analyzed three plus trillion activities across 400 enterprise environments, and the big finding was that most security risk comes from routine abuses of normal trusted access paths, and not from the zero-day exploits, the big attention getters. For MSPs and VARs that are listening, what does that actually mean about where the real risk is in customers’ environments right now?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, that’s a good question. I think when you look at it, we already know that most customers or end users, the bad guys are already in their organization in some form or fashion. They just don’t know it yet. So that if when you look at a security stack that might have detection and response capabilities and some other of those high valued propositions, because when we look at what we do, we’re one piece of the puzzle. But when you look at that, we know that exists. And we already, I think most people say, assume the breach is how fast you can kind of detect it. So when we look at what we do from a technology perspective, we help that blast radius, right? We help organizations prevent attacks, we minimize that blast radius, we maintain business continuity, even when attackers are already inside. So I tell our partners and MSPs to say, “Hey, look, we all agree that something is going to happen, but how do we control that? What does that look like?” And that’s really where Zero Networks comes in.

Robert Dutt: And that’s, you know, you touch on sort of going from detect and respond to what I’ll call sort of contained by default as an approach there. How do you explain that shift to a partner who’s kind of built their practice around EDR, around a traditional SOC stack, that kind of thing?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. So our motion today is not like, “Hey, look, displace all these things that you’ve sold your customers today. That doesn’t make sense.” But most of our customers are being asked from a compliance standpoint or regulatory compliance standpoint to do, “Hey, I don’t love using the term, but the zero trust architecture or platform pieces of it, right? That’s a real thing.” And we’re one piece of that puzzle, although a very, very big piece. So when I talk to partners of like, “Hey, look, things that still matter to end users are protecting uptime, revenue, safety while meeting compliance requirements amid financial and operation cyber risks. It exists today.” And regulatory and compliance pieces are still coming down, even though they’ve sold multiple various technologies in cyber. So we’re really good at helping them solve that piece in parts. There are times where we talk about, “Hey, look, this is what an EDR does. This is what we do. This is why we work well together, and we’re not telling you not to have an EDR.” But we also look at it as if you look at all the breaches, and again, we’re not trying to scare anybody, but if you look at all the breaches, almost all of them had an EDR. They all had some kind of technology in that stack, but it didn’t prevent what had happened from a breaching perspective, and we really control that.

Robert Dutt: Okay. On the partner program side of things, you’ve moved from, I think it was around 20% partner led to 100% channel first over the course of three years. To step back in time a little bit, what either broke or didn’t work about the old model that led you down that path?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. It was more of a people-type scenario when we started three years ago, we were a younger company, but didn’t have the people or process. We didn’t really have a programmatic approach, and we didn’t have relationships in the partner community. So I don’t view it as a fault of Zero Networks at all, but when I came in and the hiring that we’ve done with the team on the go-to-market side as well as our sales, we really just kind of dug our trenches in to say, “Hey, look, the partner community is where we want to be. They do a fantastic job. They’ve got great relationships. They’ve got technical resources. Let’s embrace it.” So it wasn’t that we were shying away from it. We were just a much, much smaller company. And so with the growth of the people that we brought on board, allowed us to say, “Okay, now we are ready to kind of really do this and focus and concentrate to making sure that the partners not only are happy, but focus on what will make them grow even further or faster with us.”

Robert Dutt: A tale as old as time, I think, in the channel space, the sort of company starts to build up direct to some level, then realizes, “Okay, how do we multiply this?” And that’s when you bring in folks who understand the channel and start to build that out. Totally familiar. And that’s exactly it.

Let’s talk about Zero to Sixty, the program update specifically. So if I’m a VAR or MSP that’s already working with you guys, what are the two or three changes that I’m going to feel most immediately in how I sell, how I deliver, and how I work with you?

Adam Hofeler: You’ll get additional registration or partner protection, not only on the length of time, but the dollars in which you’re going to be protected. So there’s usually some money, financial pieces tied to it. So most individual partners like that. From a company perspective for those partners, we have set an alignment of marketing dollars affiliated with that. So there’s some good things that we can do based on marketing with our partners, having end user events or various things internally as well. Do we have that available to us? And the third thing is enablement, not only on the sales, but the technical side. So those partners that can really embrace our technology, learning it from a technical perspective, we’ll reap some benefits along those lines as well.

Robert Dutt: Deal reg and pricing friction in general are perennial pain points or points of discussion in the industry. You’ve talked publicly about mandatory deal registration and no direct competition with partners. I guess the question is, as you scale that, how do you enforce that structurally and culturally?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. It’s a big thing for me and for our company. When we talk about it, in my time of doing something like this, partners really want a couple of things. They want trust. Trust not only from the company, but from the people that they do business with at the field level. They want to be profitable. They want to make money because there’s a lot of technologies that they don’t make as much money, but it’ll cost them just as much on their time, energy, and effort, the value of time. And they want to make sure the technology works. So they can go and sell something else and they can have happy customers. So there’s three things that play a part in that. So we’re really trying to solve those three things and make sure that it’s sustaining, not just for our first year of changing the Zero to Sixty model, but making it a long-lived solution for them that they had a good experience so they’ll keep coming back and back and tell their friends within the organization to say, “Great experience, treated us well, made some good money, and oh, by the way, I’ve got a happy customer.”

Robert Dutt: You reported 45% year over year growth in MSP partnerships. Just to clarify there, is that growth in number of MSPs and revenue through MSPs both? What’s the point there?

Adam Hofeler: Good question. Yeah, the 45% growth was in revenue from the MSPs, and we’re looking to actually double that this coming year in revenue. We are not looking to scale and grow to just be MSP-centric, but it is a big focus and attention for us. Our technology does lend itself to a great MSP practice. In this space, not a lot of MSPs have the chance and opportunity to leverage microsegmentation based on some other providers and their complexity of the way they can do it. For us, we’ve solved that issue, so we really want to get out in front of the MSP and MSP practice. For those companies that are interested from a partnering perspective, we’d love to talk to them and see where it goes. Making it profitable will have its own separate, unique process from a pricing perspective and procedure, let alone what the technology can do for their end users from a manageability perspective when they manage that.

Robert Dutt: You’ve described the MSP opportunity as shifting from reactive incident response to a recurring resilience kind of position. Practically speaking, what does that service look like and what is the MSP actually delivering on an ongoing basis once the initial containment deployment is done?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, so we have the unique ability to produce a risk assessment report so an MSP can show their end users the value that this technology is bringing them from a security, from a compliance piece. Manageability is pretty light on the MSP piece. Our system has an automation approach to what we do and how we do it, so that it takes some hours away from our MSP to focus on maybe some other things while the technology really can help them deliver some of the other initiatives that they might have. While we continue to tag all the assets, which is a challenge in the microsegmentation world, as well as building rules and policies that the MSP would have to do, now our technology can take that burden off of them for the most part. So it’s really helping our MSPs hit a core, I guess, end user state for them, not leveraging maybe all the services that they might have had on another technology. So really a lot of big value added to an MSP and to end users.

Robert Dutt: One angle that I think MSPs – MSPs anywhere – are interested in right now is cyber insurance. Insurers are increasingly requiring proof of segmentation and zero trust controls before issuing or renewing a policy. How are you seeing partners use that fact as sort of a door opener with customers who might not otherwise consider this a priority?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, great question. When we do see it, there are some times where cyber insurance comes and we’ve been able to reduce some of that cost for cyber insurance because they have our technology. So there’s a benefit for the end users, I don’t want to say quite immediately, but once they find out that they do have a zero trust or microsegmentation strategy, because at the end of the day, we reduce downtime and minimize serious incident costs. We lower incident severity and faster recovery, improve executive confidence from a governance posture perspective. So these are all things that cyber insurance agencies are looking at that we can accomplish with our technology. So one, I’m thankful that we have it, but two, we do see that question come up. I’ll say maybe 20% these days with that number probably only growing at an exorbitant amount based on the relevance of that cyber insurance question that you asked.

Robert Dutt: Let’s zoom in on Canada a little bit. The press release announcing the Zero to Sixty developments mentions distribution partners in Europe, Australia, Japan, some major US-based enterprise partners. I didn’t see Canada specifically called out, but can you help me out with what the channel footprint actually looks like here in Canada today and especially where you need more help from Canadian partners, whether that’s geographically, whether that’s vertically, whether that’s whatever measure.

Adam Hofeler: Yeah. If I say all over, would that be too much, Robert? When you’re a fast growing company, there’s different areas of focus that you have, right? And we don’t have anybody from a Zero Networks perspective based in Canada. So everything has been through the partners and the partner community. We’ve had interest there and we do have some partners today. It is a great market for us. And we are kind of diving in this year in 2026 more into the Canada market in the major markets. And my ask would be if there’s a partner that’s interested in a fast growing cybersecurity company unique in the market and industry, we’d love to talk to them. So that’s typically in the major markets, but we’re not excluding anyone that might have some great customers that are interested in the product or services that we offer. So the partners that we have today, there’s a few that are headquartered and based in Canada, but some of them are the national partners that cover all of North America that we have today.

Robert Dutt: For Canadian partners who are evaluating the space, there are some established players – Illumio, Akamai Guardicore, those kinds of folks. You guys are combining network segmentation with identity segmentation, restricting admin and service account access, and not just network traffic. How do you explain that distinction to a partner who thinks, “All right, I’ve already got microsegmentation covered.”

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, it’s not easy, by the way. I think sometimes we have a preconceived notion of, “Oh, I already have that already,” or, “I have this technology and they do that.” And we have to take a step back and say, “Well, they do parts of it and not completely.” So yeah, with our unique approach of having an identity-based access enforcement at the network layer with just-in-time access for administrative and lateral movement pathways, this allows us to kind of dive into deeper of what network segmentation is and identity segmentation is. By default, we close privileged ports or privileged access, and then only when the customer identifies themselves will we open to that. So I take the scenario as such of, “Hey, look, you have some of these other providers. That’s great.” There’s three superhero things that we do differently. One, we don’t have an agent, so you don’t have to worry about it from an agent approach and sending agents across the entire infrastructure. So right away, partners like that, “Oh, okay, now I don’t need an agent.” The second piece that’s one of our superpowers is we have an automation engine, and the automation engine tags all the assets and builds the rules and policies, which customers in the past have been a big, big challenge, and then I have that just-in-time MFA aspect of things. So I tell the partner that’s just learning about microsegmentation is you have a neighborhood, and if there’s bad guys who are trying to get into one of the houses, what do they look for? They look for an open garage or a window or a screen door, whatever the case might be. That doesn’t mean that the house doesn’t have some protection around it. It’s got a fence. It might have a dog. You might have a Ring camera. All of that helps. So what we do is we’re like, “Hey, look, if someone gets in because you left a screen door open or a window open, they walk into that room. They won’t be able to move, and if they want access to open the door, they’ll have to identify themselves with who they are.” So I try to put in some terms of those folks that may know what we do from a network and identity segmentation and kind of go a little bit deeper. Or if I’m just starting out from a partner and they’re looking for something in their portfolio, I use that house analogy because it usually lets them understand it just a little bit easier to say, “Hey, look, I’m in a neighborhood. Bad guys want to find the easiest way.” Once they find a way, we just prevent anything from happening anywhere else in the house.

Robert Dutt: Identity segmentation feels particularly relevant, particularly in the sweet spot for MSPs that are in Active Directory heavy environments with lots of service accounts today. How quickly do you find partners can deploy that and start to show customers measurable risk reduction when they start with you?

Adam Hofeler: In the identity aspect of things, within two weeks. Once we’re implemented, we’ll be able to gather most of the information that we need from a service or an admin accounts, which is a big challenge for most of these companies and organizations where they don’t know where anything is or where they sit or who might have access. Within two weeks, we’d be able to identify it. Now, it’d be easy for me to say right away or immediately, and that is the case. But for the identity piece of our platform, usually we say seven to 10 days.

Robert Dutt: You guys earned a five-star rating in this year’s Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for the microsegmentation space. The only vendor to score a perfect 100 and 100% willingness to recommend, that’s a nice piece of business for you. What’s one piece of customer feedback from that process that surprised you or changed how you think about the product?

Adam Hofeler: Man, I will go to my very first week of being at Zero Networks. I come meet our CEO, Benny, up in New York. I’m at a customer site. This is where I’m meeting him. I’m in the conference room, and the CIO says, “We love your product.” And I’m still new. I really don’t know exactly what we do, to be honest with you, Robert. I’m like, “Okay, I love hearing that. That’s good.” He absolutely gushed for five or 10 minutes about our product and who we are and what we do and how we’ve helped their organization. I’m like, “All right, this is great.” We go to a dinner that night, and there’s probably a room of 20 individuals, about 20% of the room is a customer of Zero Networks and the others are prospects. And they could not stop raving about our product. And I look to a colleague to the side of me, I’m like, “What’s happening here?” Really, where did I just go? Customers just sing our praises. And so that set the tone for me being here for almost three years of customers really love what we do. And it’s great that we have a technology that customers love it, but we’re actually solving a business challenge they have and they’ve had. And it became a reckoning to say, “Our technology really does it.” So we are growing very, very fast and it’s primarily because our customers are recommending us to other customers. They talk about their challenges that they might’ve had. They talked about how we solved it and how quickly we’ve had the ability to solve it. So to some degree, I thought I was in the Twilight Zone the very first day and it continues to grow and manifest itself as we continue to grow. And so when we talk about the five-star rating and how customers really sing our praises, it’s very much true. I haven’t had this in my sales career for quite some time that if I put a customer on the phone and I just hop off, I really feel that whoever they’re talking to is going to become a Zero Networks customer as well, just because it’s not just the technology works, but how do we support them? What is our sales engagement? How does our partner community embrace them? It’s great you have technology, but if we gouge them in some form or fashion or they felt uneasy about it, they wouldn’t recommend us.

Robert Dutt: Two quick ones before we wrap up here. You’re talking about expanding in Canada, expanding the MSP business. It sounds like there’s opportunity there. If I’m a Canadian MSP listening and I wanted to start a conversation tomorrow, what’s the literal first step that you’d recommend they take to engage with you guys?

Adam Hofeler: Yeah, they can reach us on our website that would go to our go-to-market team or an email at partners@zeronetworks.com would be the very, very first step. And again, if they’re just trying to learn about the technology or interested, let’s have a conversation and see if it’s the right mutual fit for not only Zero Networks, but for them to be brought into their portfolio.

Robert Dutt: All right. And we have to ask this one. The partner program is called Zero to Sixty. I love that branding. It’s a cute little bit of marketing business, but here in Canada and other metric markets, Zero to Sixty just doesn’t have the same ring to it. It’s like a nice drive down a country road. Any chance we’ll see a Zero to 100 program for Canadian partners?

Adam Hofeler: And if you like that, maybe we need to. I think I’m in. We would love to do nothing more but to gain more access to partners. And if it’s the naming convention that works, I’m in. Whatever works.

Robert Dutt: Adam, I appreciate you taking the time. Thank you.

Adam Hofeler: Thanks, Robert. Appreciate the time.

Robert Dutt: There it is. My conversation with Adam Hofeler from Zero Networks. If there’s a line from this conversation that I think is worth sitting with, it’s that most security risk isn’t coming from exotic zero-day exploits. It’s coming from routine abuse of normal trusted access paths. That’s a finding from over 3 trillion activities across 400 enterprise environments. And it makes a pretty strong case for the shift from detect and respond to contained by default isn’t just marketing language. If microsegmentation is on your radar, whether as a security play or as a way to open cyber insurance conversations with your customers, maybe Zero to Sixty is worth a look for you. Tomorrow on In The Channel, I’m sitting down with Merium Khalid from Barracuda’s SOC to go through their managed XDR threat report, including the finding that 90% of ransomware incidents exploited firewalls, often through vulnerabilities more than a decade old. That’s tomorrow right here on ChannelBuzz.ca. Thanks for listening. I’m Robert Dutt for ChannelBuzz.ca, and I’ll see you in the channel.