CRN Channel Awards - Finalist Q&A with Per Skanne, Chief Product Officer at Surveil

Per Skanne talks being a finalist at this year's CRN Channel Awards

What prompted you to enter the CRN Channel Awards this year?

We’re changing how business gets done in the channel. Too many partner conversations still start with guesswork. Surveil Navigator, our category-defining platform, replaces it with hard data from each customer’s own environment, so partners know there’s real value for both sides before they make the call. It powers both motions: out-of-the-box CSP campaigns that grow licensing revenue and reclaim incentives like Partner Earned Credit, and workshops helping MSPs design tiered services on our platform. Together, that creates an ecosystem where every customer interaction is relevant, intelligent and profitable. That shift is exactly what the Vendor Innovation Award recognises, so entering made sense.

What would winning this award mean to both your people and your customers/partners?

For our people, it would validate a year of pushing the bar, especially on AI, and doing it with partner and customer input at every stage. For our partners, it’s recognition of what we’ve achieved together. Surveil is white labelled by some of the largest IT services providers in the world, so our technology has quietly powered their success for years under their brands. Winning would put the Surveil name alongside that work, and show partners that the intelligence behind their growth is recognised as the most innovative in the channel.

What would you say is your company’s proudest achievement over the past year?

Launching Surveil for AI, and the speed we got it to market. Enterprises are scaling AI faster than they can govern it, and Surveil for AI gives them clear visibility of token, model and agent costs. It’s also AI for Surveil: AI is built into the platform, and our MCP release lets partners and customers integrate Surveil natively into their existing processes using agent flows. And a milestone the channel will appreciate: we’ve reached 500,000+ tenants served, a scale only possible thanks to the partners who deliver Surveil every day.

What have been the biggest challenges of the current year so far and how have you overcome them? How have your people/partners helped with that?

Keeping pace with our own innovation. AI is accelerating everything, and keeping partners, and our own teams, up to speed with what we ship, alongside surging demand from strategic partnerships, has been demanding. We turned it into a strength. As CPO, I introduced a continuous development framework, and our co-development programme brings partners in before features go into build, so they spot new services opportunities faster. Partners have helped enormously. In the AI era, customers want tailored solutions, and our partners have scaled managed services on our platform to meet those needs and fill a real gap in the market.

What lessons do you think the industry has learned over the past year and what changes do you think it still needs to make?

The channel has learned that reselling alone is no longer enough. Microsoft’s move to modern commerce has reshaped how partners are rewarded, and licensing margins are tightening. The change still needed is diversification: moving from reseller to trusted technology advisor, with managed services at the core. Microsoft is only getting started, which is why we keep driving innovation into Navigator. The second lesson is adaptability. AI is moving faster than most organisations can absorb. As our own first customer, fully AI-empowered, we’ve learned what it takes to stay relevant. Many service providers are still learning.

What do you see as the main opportunities for the industry in the coming 12 months? How do you plan to capitalise on those opportunities?

The biggest opportunity is the gap between how fast technology moves and how fast organisations can adapt. Bridging it will create enormous demand for services. The partners who win will be connected by data-driven intelligence, with distributors, resellers, service providers and end customers navigating challenges together. We’ll capitalise by linking data across the entire go-to-market chain, giving everyone collective intelligence on revenue opportunities, managed services and the problems customers are facing. Navigator powers partner growth, and our consumption-based platform powers their managed services. Few bring both together, and that’s how we’ll help the channel operate better, sell more and grow more profitably.