Hey channel insiders, I'm your host Katie Bavoso and welcome to this episode of Partner POV brought to you by Netscope. Businesses are under increasing pressure to modernize quickly, but it's difficult to do so safely and efficiently, especially at scale. Today's organizations are navigating cloud complexity, data protection challenges, and the growing pressure to adopt AI securely. That's why partnerships matter, but only when they deliver real outcomes.
That's why Netscope and Optive partner together to go beyond tools and focus on visibility, services, and helping customers move forward with confidence. For more on this, I'm now joined by Joe Green, vice president of solutions engineering, worldwide partners and alliances at Netscope, and Paul Herman, practice manager for Sassy at Optive. Welcome, gentlemen, and I'm so happy to see you both here today. Let's dive right in. First, let's get a bit of background on your partnership.
Optive is Netscope's largest partner. How long have you been partnered together and how do you complement each other? Joe, would you like to get us started? >> Absolutely, Katie. Thank you for having me here today. To all of uh the people watching and listening, thank you very much for joining us here today. We've got a very, let's say, long and deep relationship with Optive, spanning actually over a decade. Optive was an early adopter of our technology.
They have an incredibly deep background, not only in cyber, but also in networking. And working with the Netscale platform, it's actually key to us that a partner can span both of those networking side as well as the cyber side. And Optive has a great trained salesforce and also a Salesforce that is partnered with a really strong engineering team so they can actually help us with the implementations as well. >> Paul, I'd love to hear your take on this.
How do you complement each other? >> Yeah, like Joe was saying, we've been partnered together for over 10 years and with Netscope's marketleading sassy capabilities and our strong services organization and our cyber security expertise, it just felt really natural to partner together. You know, I look back the years that I've been at Optive and you know what we've been able to do from a velocity perspective with Net Scope's capabilities. It's been such a fantastic relationship to have together. >> Well, I also want to point out that it's been a very exciting time for Net Scope since going public in September of 2025.
So, Joe, how has that IPO changed things not only for Net Scope, but your channel partners as well? >> A lot of changes actually. And you know, as I tell everybody, it's one thing to see a picture on LinkedIn of us going public and the confetti cannons and standing at Netsco. It's a very exciting moment, but all kidding aside, I've been here for 7 years. And I would just tell you, going public is a very hard thing to do. It's a long journey. It takes the work of thousands of people working 70 hours a week.
Like, it's incredibly incredibly hard. The thing I would like to express the most is we didn't and this is a direct quote from our CEO Sanjay Barry. We didn't go public because we needed to raise money. We we didn't at all. We went public because we needed the exposure, right? >> We needed Sanjay to be on CNBC with Jim Kramer. We needed the press releases and the headlines and to get our financials out there publicly. going public for us here at Netsco.
This was an incredible moment that gave us the exposure on a world stage that we have been needing because we are fighting and competing against public companies. And just imagine us in 2012, we were founded, we became a company. There was no Gartner magic quadrant in 2012 for cloud security. Gartner didn't even have a magic quadrant until 2017. So, we were slugging it out for five years as a company trying to create a market and that all culminated and became real in September of last year.
So, thank you for asking. Incredibly rewarding but very hard journey. >> Amazing. And congratulations on all your success. The confetti cannons are for after when you get to celebrate. So, we know how hard you worked, but I'm glad that you had that opportunity. Phenomenal. Paul, I'd like to move on to you with this next question. Netscope and Optive work together far beyond a traditional vendor reseller relationship. How does this partnership fundamentally change the customer experience compared to a standalone technology purchase? >> Yeah, I think the difference is in our outcomes.
You know, buying technology alone doesn't solve challenges like AI governance or cloud adoption. how we do our services. We're adding in a strategy, architecture, design, and implementation services to ensure our mutual clients with Netscope are actually implementing measurable security improvements throughout the entire life cycle of advise, deploy, and operate of the Netscope platform. And also, Optive has a Netscope dedicated partner architect embedded into our engagement model to be a bridge between our teams.
And that's giving us direct access to expertise as well. >> Amazing. Great to have that direct pipeline like you said. Paul, what's the number one issue or challenge impacting your customers right now? And how are you as a team best positioned to stop or prevent these problems? >> Yeah, I think the biggest challenge I see right now that's impacting our customers is balancing innovation with security, especially around AI. Organizations want to leverage the agility and maturity of adopting the use of AI, but they also need to consider any potential impacts around data leakage and compliance.
You opt and Netscope are addressing this. We're doing real-time visibility control around SAS AI and associated DLP policies that are really helping bring that story together to, you know, balance that agility and maturity there. >> Jill, how do customers use the Netscope platform to help them on their AI journeys while also staying secure? Some great points to echo from what Paul was just saying. >> Absolutely. And the way I like to answer this is just to take a little bit of a step back.
The number one reason people are buying the Netscope platform is to secure their journey into the cloud, right? They want to secure their cloud applications and they want to secure their data in the cloud. We're a cloud first company. We were born in the cloud. We were not born in hardware. We're not taking hardware on prem and trying to drag it into the cloud. We don't have any of that legacy hardware holding us back. We we literally started as a cloud company in 2012, which is hard to believe considering, you know, that was about 14 years ago, right?
So customers are buying us because we're a cloud first company because we understand the language of the cloud. You know, we could talk about JSON and API. We don't need to go into the weeds, but we natively speak the language of cloud applications. Customers are buying us because we take action in line real time. So when customers first started buying Netscope back in the day, we were offering a service called shadow IT and this is early in the cloud life cycle and what people were struggling with and when I say people I mean prospects and customers what they were struggling with they did not know what their employees were doing in the cloud and so they said do you have a tool that you can just help show us what are people doing what applications are they using we'll touch on that more but that is really how Netcope started.
But once you show people what their employees are doing, then they want to take action. And that's where the power of the Net Scope Cloud, we're our platform is not one product. It's over 20 products now. And they're all in one platform. They're all in one management solution. And we're helping companies to reduce their capex and their OPEX by simplifying and consolidating what they are doing in the cloud. We should actually continue on that same thought because you brought up shadow IT, but you used a phrase with me that feels both familiar and very scary, brand new at the same time.
You've actually spoken, Joe, about the unofficial phrase of shadow AI. So, what exactly is that and how is that something that Net Scope is built to handle? >> Okay, so and this ties into a lot of what Paul is saying. Paul, thank you for, you know, setting that up so nicely. This is a term shadow AI and it's a it's a real term. And so what this term means very specifically is people are using AI tools that are not sanctioned or approved inside of a company and the employer doesn't even know they're using them, right?
And it's because maybe they don't have software that can unencrypt this this data. Maybe they're doing it from home. Maybe they're doing it from a personal laptop as opposed to a work laptop. So shadow AI is nothing more than people using AI applications that are not sanctioned and the company does not know about. The problem is you need to control that and companies they only want their employees to use applications that they have approved for use.
And again I like I I I have no um skin in the game so to speak with any AI company. One company could say Gemini is what we use. Another company could say well actually we use chat GPT and for our developers maybe we use claude from anthropic it doesn't matter to us as a company we can speak the language of all those AI applications we working with a partner like optive we can apply security controls in real time to say you are only allowed to use this application and if a user goes to the wrong application we can gently coach them pop up a message interact with the user in real time and say, "Look, you're trying to go to Gemini, but your company has only approved chat GPT.
We're going to gently redirect you over there. We're going to log this, but again, we don't want to stifle creativity and we don't want to block employees from being productive, but we do want them using the proper tools that are sanctioned and approved by their IT department." Paul, with Joe's answer in mind, how does Optive build onto Netscope solutions with its services to continue adding value for customers? >> Yeah, I think Shadow IT and Shadow AI are perfect examples why services matter.
Netcope is giving their customers great visibility into usage of AI and shadow IT and what SAS applications and AI tools are being used in their environment. And Opto is able to take that to be able to create DLP policies that are targeted towards those applications. And like Joe was talking about, we can coach those users say, well, hey, you know, you're going to chat GBT, but here's how we can coach you to say, hey, Gemini is actually our corporate approved solution.
And we can help define governance frameworks for AI usage and help mature that environment and not only allow access for those applications and those AI tooling. You can leverage DLP type controls to say, well, hey, we're going to allow you to do this, but if you violate these DLP policies, we will say, well, hey, you can't input client data inside of this based on the DLP rules that are in place to help put controls in for even the sanctioned AI usage. >> It really makes it easy for ultimately the end user who is just trying to be able to do their job without also getting their hands slapped.
This helps them get such great guard rails which is I'm sure is so necessary for so many companies these days that are just trying to use AI to see how they can gather ROI from it. But let's talk about the customer a little bit more and what I would like to know is how do Netscope and Optive work together before approaching the customer to reduce friction when it's time to meet with them and pitch your joint solutions. I'd like to hear from both of you.
Joe, would you mind starting us off? >> I I'd love to. So in my current role at Netscope, I only focus on partners. Now I talk to enduser customers almost every day of the week. So it's not that I'm I'm not in that group, but I focus on our channel partners. So a couple of very important things to understand. We Net Scope as a company, we do not sell direct. Okay? All of our business, 100% of it worldwide goes through a channel partner. The other incredibly important thing to know about Netcope is we would prefer not to do partner services or implementation services at a company.
We want our partners like Optive who are highly trained who are part of our partner program which is called Evolve. Optive has many certifications. They have people trained. We want Optive to take that business because they actually have the direct relationship with the client. They are entrenched in those accounts. Some of the customers that we work together on Optive has had that customer for five maybe 10 years maybe even longer. So although Netscope we have a direct sales force and we have salespeople and engineers and channel people and we have this you know huge account team that is tasked and carries a quota and is out there meeting with customers and trying to land business.
In an ideal world and in a perfect world which we try to live in every day, we want optive in the first meeting with the customer. We want them on that sales call with the Net Scope sales team. So ideally we are going out there together. We are doing a joint sales call and the customer is seeing us together and saying okay we've got Net Scope the vendor, you make the product. We've got Optive the partner. We're actually going to buy it through Optive.
Optive is going to do the implementation and then Net Scope on the back end. If Optive has has any problems, whether it's a technical support issue or they need a backs stop of any kind, Netcope will step in and we will support Optive directly on anything they need. That's how our relationship goes and that's what we want the customer to see. >> Well, from the partner side, Paul, how would you build on or bolster what Joe just said? Yeah, I think we do a really good job at collaborating early and often for all of our joint accounts.
And I think that really speaks volumes to how we're having a unified strategy on, you know, what solutions they should be purchasing, what should they be implementing, what are you going to do in year 1, year 2, year three and beyond. And as Net Scope's rapidly implementing new capabilities, sometimes, you know, we're midstream inside of an implementation and, you know, Net Scope's bringing us in to say, hey, you know, this thing's coming out in the next quarter. we think this client this is going to help with their outcomes and we'll have those conversations be very strategic and having that unified messaging I think has been very very valuable for our joint partnership >> let's get a real example of customer success can you walk me through a recent joint win where Netcope technology and optive services work together across the full life cycle for a customer from initial deployment to expansion or ongoing support Paul can you get us started >> yeah so this is a one of many examples that we have with our partnership.
So we had a global automotive engineering organization. They're going through a major cloud security transformation. Netscope helped deliver the platform, the technology foundation and Optive let our the entire services life cycle to bring that vision to life. We worked with this global team to deploy Netsco private access across 50 locations. We did a full analysis their environment to help identify where all their applications lived, how users were accessing them.
We configured many publishers and many private applications, built SOP documentation, implemented DNS security controls, and we operationalize the broader Netscope platform. We implemented or CASBY, DLP, secure web gateway, sanctioned instances, and clientless MPA for contractor access. And all of that together, we were able to build dashboards and reporting with their advanced analytics platform to give them full visibility into their environment.
And once everything was built and optimized and running at scale, we did a transition to our managed services team for support past that. And you know, they're also going through a big merger and acquisition right now. And we were able to, you know, bring that back in to help support that as well currently today. >> I am so glad I let you kick us off with this. That's a great example to go over. I guess Joe, I would bring you in just to talk about how that experience was made that much more simple and smooth because Optive is your longtime partner.
A couple things Paul highlighted that are really important to me. There was not one product involved in this deal. They bought our platform. Now that doesn't mean they bought every product we offer, but they bought multiple products. And of course, as a company and a vendor, we are tracking on a customer base. Is a customer buying one product, two product, three product? What percentage of our customers are buying that? And again, we track this very closely. this particular customer um and in their industry they purchased five or six different products inside of the Netscope platform and there are many more to buy but to operationalize that and to have a successful deployment we need a partner we can trust right we're going to be there to help them so if Optive is out there and they're deploying a product and out of that whole portfolio they're like hey our guys are really good but there's this one new product like Paul mentioned uh clientless NPA, Netscope Private Access, which is like a remote access VPN, but a very secure one.
That product's been around for years. But the clientless aspect of it, that's a little bit newer. And so if Optive, you know, they needed help with that or whatever, that's where whether it's our product management team, our engineering team, our support team, we're going to backs stop Optive with any help they need. But we have trust and faith in Optive because they've been a partner with us for 10 years. because their people are trained, they're certified, they're accredited, they've gone through all of the Net Scope training, we have faith in Optive as a partner that they are going to be able to deliver that solution.
Whatever the product was in that deployment, we are confident that Optive is trained and they can deliver the services and they can complete that implementation to us. And I I'll close with this. When a customer buys a product or products in our platform, we don't ever want anything to be shelfware. We want everything to be deployed. We want it to be configured because at the end of the day, a customer must see value in what they bought. >> Well, I know I'm excited and I know those who are listening and watching today are just as excited.
So, for those who want to learn more about Netscope and Optive and the work you're doing together, where can they go? >> For us, it's very simple, right? you you go to netscope.com. You can get everything you need there. You can learn about our programs. You can learn about our partnership. Optive is featured on our website as well. Also, at any time connect with your local Net Scope team. We've got people everywhere in every theater around the world.
A lot of them know their Optive rep as well. So whether they reach out to Netscope directly, they reach out to Optive directly, the amount of people and resources available to help them, it's actually quite vast. If we look forward, right, there's shows like RSA coming up at the end of March. For anyone who was at AWS reinvent in December in Las Vegas, that was literally just a month ago. Netcope had a very big presence there. So, in addition to reaching out, whether it's on the web or to local teams, any of these trade shows, industry events, Net Scope, Optive, we sometimes we do these jointly together, sometimes we do them separately, but there's always an opportunity to meet people in person at an event like that.
Well, Joe, Paul, thank you both so much for your time today. It's been such a pleasure getting to talk to both of you and thank you at home for joining us. For more episodes of PartnerP, check out channelinssider.com. Once again, I'm Katie Bavoso and I'll see you next time.
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