GoTo CEO Paddy Srinivasan Talks Hybrid Work, Zero Trust and Partner Relationships
"Our products are essential products, not nice-to-have products," he said.
November 23, 2022
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Channel Futures: You use the word unique. I wonder how GoTo is truly unique in this space. What sets the company apart?
GoTo’s Paddy Srinivasan: I think there are two dimensions of this. One is knowing and appreciating our customers, walking in their shoes and producing software that specifically addresses those things. Let me give you an example. Even though we do business with some of the largest of enterprises, our target customer that we proactively go after is the midmarket customer. We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time the last 14 years understanding this customer, understanding their needs, and understanding their constraints from a budget and a skill point of view. Building technology that uniquely supports and delivers on these needs is very, very differentiating for us.
I’ll give you an another example. We have a contact center solution. There are so many different contact center solutions in the world. Most of them are exorbitantly expensive, and all of them take months to implement. Our contact center solution does 80% of what these complicated solutions do but can be implemented in less than half a day. That’s what makes us unique; that is our major differentiator. And it all starts from knowing our customers much, much better than our competitors [know theirs]. The second part that makes us unique is the combination of products we have. We’re the only company that helps companies do both business communications and helps them address all their IT needs all in one application.
CF: GoTo has adopted not just a hybrid work environment but a flexible work environment. How do you define flexibility for your employees? What is flexibility and why did your company embrace it?
PS: We’ve always been a fairly distributed company. We were actually founded in Budapest, Hungary, and then we expanded to Boston and then to other parts of the world. But the pandemic really accelerated things even more. We started hiring in the countries that we were already in, whether it is India, Germany, Ireland, the United States or Canada. Even in South America we started hiring in non-major cities.
When you look at our workforce, it’s truly distributed even inside these countries. We have started hiring from remote parts even. We are seeking talent wherever they are versus requiring talent to come and be in a physical location together. We still have world-class offices in all of the major cities that we are operating in, but we are not making it mandatory to work from them. It gives us a tremendous amount of freedom and optionality in seeking, attracting and retaining the best talent wherever they are in the countries that we operate.
CF: Is it more profitable for you to have a flexible work environment than otherwise? Is that what you’re finding?
PS: It was not driven by economics. We haven’t really closed any of our major offices. We have expanded and contracted in some places because even at the Boston office, for example, we have five floors, and we barely have 25-30 people show up every day. So we said, “Why don’t we try to use our floors more effectively so that we can establish greater camaraderie?” We’ve done some things like that, but this is not driven by cost containment or anything like that. This is purely from the perspective of, can we get the best talent in the countries that we are operating in regardless of where they are or what their preferred work patterns are.
CF: I would imagine it’s still beneficial financially because if you’re able to retain workers, you obviously don’t have the churn. You don’t have the cost of having to constantly replace employees who are moving on to other companies?
PS: Absolutely. It has really helped us contain the churn rate or the attrition of employees. And we just finished our annual employee engagement survey. One common theme is our employees absolutely love the flexible work model. They’re not working any less now, but they’re able to work in a very flexible manner, where they can make time for their families, take care of things that are important to them, while at the same time giving their 100% to the company.
And especially in the developing world, it’s amazing how much they appreciate not having to sit in traffic or public transportation for four hours a day. It’s really amazing what this can do to unlock productivity. In many cases they’re actually giving it back to the company. We’re seeing really high-quality work being turned out as a result. It’s a win for both us and the employees.
CF: Can you describe GoTo’s efforts to incorporate zero trust initiatives for both your employees and for your customers? Is it true that GoTo is one of the first unified communications companies to implement the practice of zero trust? And how do you relay this message of zero trust to your company’s employees, but then also to partners and to customers?
PS: Zero trust is a philosophy. It’s an approach to security which basically just says you don’t trust anything, and you verify everything. And the way we have approached this is not just as a philosophy, but also our GoTo Resolve platform is the first zero trust, remote monitoring, remote management, remote support platform in the world. And the way it enforces that tangibly inside the product is that this technology is used to distribute software to thousands and tens of thousands of devices. Imagine if a bad actor got access to our infrastructure or to one of these kinds of products. This is what happened with the multiple ransomware attacks over the last couple of years, like the Colonial Pipeline and so forth. A bad actor gets access to infrastructure software like ours. Once they can control that, they can just take ransomware or malware and distribute that across our tens of thousands of customers.
So what we did was we said we will put zero trust in terms of how our software distributes bits and bytes across the internet and deploy it in end computers or endpoints. Every customer’s administrator must digitally sign every deployment. In the worst case, even if we are compromised, the blast radius is going to be contained to our servers and our systems versus a bad actor using our infrastructure to infiltrate federal agencies or state and local governments or K-12 schools and our customers. This is because it requires multifactor authentication of the respective system administrators of those companies to provide access to deploy anything to their systems. That’s how we have taken zero trust and implemented it in our products to keep our customers safe.
We also embrace zero trust up and down the stack inside our company to protect our infrastructure services. We have multilayer authentication for all our production systems, developer environments, and so forth. It becomes really hard for anyone either with malintent or by negligence to leave something exposed to a bad actor. We are embracing zero trust as a philosophy to protect our internal systems, but also implementing it as concrete technology in many of our products now so that we protect our customers and their data; their endpoints are protected on an ongoing basis.
CF: GoTo recently acquired Miradore, the cloud-based device management provider. The combination of GoTo resolve and Miradore gives customers the ability to manage any device from any location. How did GoTo accomplish this? Without revealing too many company secrets, what is the technology behind this application? How does it work? And why is this acquisition a game changer for your company?
PS: As people started working from home during the pandemic, the number of devices they started using to access company data just exploded. The need for managing these kinds of different devices is more now than it has ever been. As a remote software, remote management and monitoring company, we had to act fast and decisively. Miradore gives us the ability to reach in and cover almost 100% of the operating systems worldwide. We can monitor, manage and support any device on any hardware on any operating system. We can control the policies. We can lock it down; we can remote wipe it. We can install software, we can upgrade software, we can do the whole software life-cycle management on these devices without having physical access to them. That’s what Miradore technology gives us the ability to do. And we are very excited by that. Both the standalone technology, but also the potential of what it can do working with the rest of our products like GoTo Resolve.
CF: How does this impact partners in what they sell to customers?
PS: Partners are super, super happy. We just launched our GoTo Resolve for MSPs a couple of months ago and also launched it through Ingram Micro. And we were not planning to include MDM until sometime middle of next year. But the MSP community has really forced us to accelerate this road map and we think we will go live in January with that capability, because it is so much in demand. It provides another monetizable revenue stream for MSPs. Not only can they manage computer endpoints, but they can also manage your mobile endpoints. Mobile endpoints outnumber desktop endpoints by a factor of three so they can really introduce a new managed service that is monetizable. Partners love it because it gives them the ability to sell something new.
CF: Many economists agree that we’re headed toward a recession. How is GoTo responding?
PS: Half the economists say we are already in a recession. Half of them say recession is coming in the next quarter. Regardless, we can see that the buying patterns of businesses are starting to change in the sense that they are being more cost-conscious. They’re being more deliberate. They want tools to do more than one thing. They want to double down on the investment on software. [They want] vendors that can provide technologies that solve more than one problem for them. We have a very unique value proposition.
Our products are essential products, not nice-to-have products. Take our phone system for example. You might be in a recession, but you still need a phone system. You need your customers to call and place orders. You need your customers to call and get service for the product or service that you’re selling. Our software is mission-critical software. We feel companies like ours are favorably positioned because in a post-pandemic recessionary/inflationary world companies are always trying to consolidate their vendor span. They’re trying to get more ROI for the dollar. They’re investing into technology, and we think we are one of the very few companies in this market that can do both well.
CF: Could you describe the GoTo partner network and how the network will empower the channel with more ways to attract new customers and increase revenue?
PS: We’ve had the GoTo partner network for a little while, but in September we announced two major updates to this program. As I mentioned, we released this new product called GoTo Resolve, specifically redesigned for managed service providers. So that’s one major update. The second one is that we also introduced a new partner concierge program, which provides sales and demand generation support for all partners. It is almost like a VIP level support for all partners to not just support our mutual customers but also be proactive in helping them close more business.
I think this is the bigger theme here. We are transitioning from having a partner ecosystem which is very transactional — where a partner gets a lead, they throw it to us, we close the deal, and we give them some commissions and say “bye.” We want to have a longer relationship with a partner. We want to invest in partnerships where we are building a long-term durable relationship with not just the customer but also with the partner. We want the partner to get more from us in terms of taking advantage of all the breadth of offerings that we have. The customers benefit in the long run.
CF: Could you describe the GoTo partner network and how the network will empower the channel with more ways to attract new customers and increase revenue?
PS: We’ve had the GoTo partner network for a little while, but in September we announced two major updates to this program. As I mentioned, we released this new product called GoTo Resolve, specifically redesigned for managed service providers. So that’s one major update. The second one is that we also introduced a new partner concierge program, which provides sales and demand generation support for all partners. It is almost like a VIP level support for all partners to not just support our mutual customers but also be proactive in helping them close more business.
I think this is the bigger theme here. We are transitioning from having a partner ecosystem which is very transactional — where a partner gets a lead, they throw it to us, we close the deal, and we give them some commissions and say “bye.” We want to have a longer relationship with a partner. We want to invest in partnerships where we are building a long-term durable relationship with not just the customer but also with the partner. We want the partner to get more from us in terms of taking advantage of all the breadth of offerings that we have. The customers benefit in the long run.
GoTo CEO Paddy Srinivasan has worked his way up at the company for nearly a decade. When GoTo was LogMeIn, he served six years as the senior vice president of products and as general manager, where he scaled the company from $130 million to $1 billion in revenue. In addition, Srinivasan’s success outside of GoTo includes time working at Amazon where he led data and machine learning for Alexa’s core AI engine.
Whether it’s starting from scratch or leading hundreds of people, he loves recruiting, building multidisciplinary teams and getting people to do the best work of their careers.
Part of doing that “best work” means establishing an environment for employees that fosters flexibility. In this interview with Channel Futures (see slideshow above) Srinivasan discusses what truly makes GoTo more than just a hybrid work environment. As he puts it, how can you develop products that promote flexibility for customers without talking the talk and walking the walk for GoTo employees? In the interview, he also takes on topics such as security and zero trust, as well as what it means to build solid relationships among GoTo’s partners.
Channel Futures: Before you became president and CEO in August, you held other positions at GoTo. How did your time in those roles shape your ability to lead the organization now?
GoTo’s Paddy Srinivasan
Paddy Srinivasan: I’ve been associated with this company on and off for almost 10 years now. I’ve had a variety of different roles, most of them in R&D or product and engineering. But I’ve also spent time as the general manager for about a third of our business. So I’m very familiar with most of our products and our technologies, but also importantly, our customers and partner ecosystem. So that to me has been the biggest preparation for me to take on this new expanded role.
I feel like in a tech company there are two things that really matter. One, how well do you know your customer and their unmet needs? Two, can we provide the technology that helps these customers solve those problems in a unique and beneficial way? I feel like some of the roles that I’ve had over the last 10 years have really put me in a good position to answer both those questions with an emphatic “yes.”
Read the remainder of our Q&A in the slideshow above.
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