Rubrik global channel boss: ‘We’re building a dedicated programme for partners interested in delivering more managed services’
Ghazal Asif talks how and where Rubrik is investing in partners and DEI goals
Rubrik’s global channel head has identified the vendor’s “biggest” priority with partners - helping them deliver “margin rich services.”
Ghazal Asif, Rubrik VP global channels and alliances (pictured) outlines to CRN her two goals for 2025.
“I’d love to see our most strategic partners continue to outpace their own expectations of their growth with Rubrik,” she says.
“With many of them, we've experienced double-digit, triple-digit growth, and we want that trajectory to continue.
“And second, I would love to see more underrepresented groups continue to come into both Rubrik and tech in general, so that we slowly start to shift our diversity mix across the board.”
On the first target, Asif explains how Rubrik plans to grow the businesses of its channel firms.
“One of our biggest priorities is enabling partners to go and deliver margin-rich services to capture the market around cyber-resilience-as-a-service, which is something that we are seeing incredible demand for.
“We are heavily investing in our partners, their competency and their ability to deliver those value-added managed services as part of our strategy to grow with them.”
She adds there are two things Rubrik is doing to achieve this.
The first involves building a more comprehensive enablement programme.
“We are building a dedicated professional services enablement programme for partners that are interested in delivering more managed services.
“It’ll be open to them with very little cost investment from their side, so that they can build the technical expertise within their own delivery teams and go and deliver these managed services.”
Rubrik’s second method includes investing in partner go-to-market.
“We've done things like, do you need to have funded heads to go and deliver? Do you need additional marketing funds?
“We're building a more comprehensive programme around both enablement and also additional investment, so that partners are set up for huge success in the next 12 months and beyond.”
50/50 gender mix
Returning to her second goal for 2025 around DEI, Asif describes Rubrik’s internship programme for its global SDR org which is in its second year.
“It’s the first foray into sales for people that want to have a great career in that area, and this is their opportunity, whether they're new graduates or want a career change.
“We've made a very specific decision that with that cohort, we need to see really good representation, to the extent that we're even saying that we want to make sure that that cohort has a 50/50, gender mix. And I'm signing off on what the economic background, the educational background of that cohort look like.”
Key tech drivers and partner message
Rubrik’s platform delivers cyber resilience to customers of all sizes across the globe.
As a result, the vendor seeing what Asif described as “tremendous” demand for its product and services that partners are delivering.
Within that, Rubrik’s fastest growing area is cloud.
“Cloud data security continues to be a massive challenge for businesses, because more data is being stored in the cloud, more companies are moving to the cloud, and therefore this data being available, being backed up, the ability to restore that data is increasingly becoming business critical.
“So cloud is an area we will continue to invest in heavily from a product standpoint, and an area that we will help our partners understand how they can leverage that opportunity too.”
Sounding off on where she wants partners to really home in, Asif names “understanding their own competence as it relates to Rubrik and our platform.”
“We’ve had partners that have been on the journey with us for many years, and as we've invested in our platform and also made acquisitions like Laminar last year, we've continued to have a more diverse platform that covers more workloads and partners often and rightly so, become very busy.
“So I would encourage partners really lean into Rubrik’s platform, our key differentiators and how our technology has continued to evolve, understand the use cases that we're solving.
“We're winning really large Fortune 500 opportunities at this point on a fairly regular basis, and oftentimes partners are not aware of that.
“And number two, take that learning to your sales team and help them understand specific use cases. I think if our partners continue to develop their technical understanding and competence, and also, on the sales side, specific pains and use cases we're solving for our customers, us and our partners are going to be unstoppable in the next year or two.”