Proofpoint channels focus on AI and partner ecosystem in Asia Pacific

“I would like to say we are 100% channels, but legacy-wise, we do have some customers that transact with us directly, but our promise to our partner base since 2024 is that we will not take any deals in APJ directly from the customers,” says Nelson Soon, Vice President of Channels and Alliances for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ).

As one of the fastest growing cybersecurity vendors in the world, Proofpoint relies heavily on its partner ecosystem to not just connect with customers but also understand the challenges customers face and how they can best be dealt with. A leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Email Security Platforms, Proofpoint has also ranked #1 in four out of five Use Cases in the 2025 Gartner Critical Capabilities Report for Email Security Platforms.

In terms of partnerships, Proofpoint recently announced that it is expending its global partnership with Microsoft to leverage Microsoft Azure’s robust AI capabilities and trusted cloud infrastructure to host Proofpoint’s future innovations and scale AI-powered threat and data protection. This expanded partnership drives scalable innovation and provides mutual customers with human-centric security capabilities to proactively detect and mitigate a wide array of threats that target people and the data they work with.

In Asia Pacific, Proofpoint continues to grow its presence as well. The cybersecurity vendor continues to expand and strengthen its partner ecosystem in the region. CRN Asia caught up with Nelson Soon, Vice President of Channels and Alliances for Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) to understand more about their partner ecosystem as well as their plans in the region. Soon was also recently featured in CRN Asia’s Channel Leaders Asia 2025 list.

What are the biggest challenges and concerns partners are facing today?

I'll try to answer with three P's, which is part of my channel philosophy. First P is product, second is philosophy, and third P is actually people. In terms of product, the biggest challenge that the partner base usually have is that they want to partner with a vendor that can address the current and future needs of their customers.

There are a lot of vendors out there that maybe addresses the needs in the past, but are these vendors continuously investing in the product suite to be able to address the future needs? In the past, when you have a point solution that serves a particular need, and you're very good at it, it's sufficient. However, today a lot of partners are looking for platform solution. They don't want to deal with so many different vendors, selling so many different products to a single customer.

Partners want your solution to be best of breed and ideally it has to be platform. This is what sets Proofpoint apart from a lot of other vendors. Not only are we good at what we do, we constantly go out and build and upgrade our solution. We also acquire adjacent technologies to build a complete platform, because that's what the partners and the customer want.

The second problem that the partners is philosophy. Now there are a lot of companies out there that have fantastic product or even fantastic platform, but what they do not have is a constant set of go-to market (GTM). There are vendors out there where they will take the deal in any way, shape, or form that will help them win the deal, which includes enabling the customer to buy directly if they want to. Hence, partners are generally very worried that there isn’t a standard playbook.

And I'm happy to share that in Proofpoint have a very clear strategy that our go-to market is consistent. I would like to say we are 100% channels, but legacy-wise, we do have some customers that transact with us directly, but our promise to our partner base since 2024 is that we will not take any deals in APJ directly from the customers. We will not onboard any resellers as a direct reseller. We are a clear two-tier partner go-to market.

This provides predictability about our GTM and even playing field. You will never have uneven playing field and inconsistency when you go to market.

The third concern is people. The partner wants to know who they are dealing with from a vendor standpoint. And if the vendor goes through a tremendous amount of attrition, that's a problem. Also, if the vendor's hiring process does not include channel DNA in their hiring process, that's another problem.

So here in Proofpoint, I'm also happy to share that we try to attract the best talent to join us and during our process of engaging our sales team, one of the key selection criteria is how channel-savvy are you. You need to be channel-savvy because the single breaking point is that if you do not have channel DNA in your blood, chances are things will go south even though you are a top-notch salesperson.

So, with these three Ps, I am confident to say that now and going forward, the channel's experience with engaging Proofpoint addresses some of the key and most important concerns.

With that said, what are partners also expecting to see from Proofpoint?

First thing that partners expect is to be able to sell a product that is not just current-proof, but future-proof. Also, they expect a product not just as a single-point solution.

Partners want to sell a product like a platform where the customers are actually asking for it. If they get a chance to partner with three best-of-breed products versus one best-of-breed platform, and the best-of-breed platform can guarantee them the solution is what the customer wants, they lean towards this. And this is what Proofpoint provides.

Second, they want a clear philosophy which guarantees them clear profitability, which is what partners are trying to look out for when it comes to partnering with a vendor. As we are going through a period where there's a lot of economic uncertainty, with predictable profitability, partners are able to help plan their business on what kind of investment they want to put in different products and different platform solutions.

Also, as a company, we are putting a lot of investment to build a top-notch team so that this team can provide top-class interaction when we deal with customers and partners. These are the three key things that partners are asking for.

With more vendors offering platformized solutions, how do customers make the right choice?

I think this is as much as a science and an art. In my mind, there's no hard and fast rule on having the best of breed in any solution. We are seeing a lot of customers going to platform because they can't deal with so many false positives and they cannot spend a lot of effort trying to triangulate the results from three separate solutions.

Having a best of breed platform solution that has a single pane of glass and a consistent dashboard which uses a single data depository and to be able to help you to make sense of this complicated current environment serves more of the current needs of customer right now than having every single best of breed solution.

And that's what we are noticing. I believe cybersecurity is getting more complicated especially with now the introduction of AI. Integrating AI into our solution is the biggest initiative across our entire portfolio.

Can you share more about how is Proofpoint integrating AI into solutions?

We are already seeing hackers use AI to create very unique techniques that the rules haven't caught yet. We are using AI to come up with behavioral and intent-based security practices. It's no longer whether it's URL compromise, or is this file attached malicious in nature. We are using AI to be able to differentiate the intent of the email.

This is currently in existence in our solution through an acquisition. We acquired a company that uses AI to track behavior rather than rules. We already can track rules, but with this new company's capabilities, we can track both rules, content and behavior.

We are known for our email protection solution, and it covers both email gateway and also API deployment.

But customers are also looking at our data loss prevention (DLP) solution. Not many people know of it, but we're the second biggest DLP solution provider out there in the world. So, I would say email is our bread and butter, but our data loss prevention solution is the fast-growing part of our business.

We see the world as protecting the companies from human behavior. And the single biggest threat factor right now is still email. And email targets human. So, all our solutions are wrapped around how to protect human error from being targeted by malicious threat actors.