Top Gun 51 Profile: Zerto’s Peter Kerr on Finding Balance in the Channel

Peter Kerr, Zerto’s vice president of global alliances, has had a lot of titles during his career in IT.

Zerto’s Peter Kerr

He’s been an independent web developer, a programmer analyst, a technical lead and a senior program lead. But it wasn’t until he got involved in the channel as a director of business development for the former Violin Memory in 2012 that he realized he had a passion for working in the channel, helping IT leaders in a wide range of companies solve their IT problems.

Kerr, who was recently named as a Channel Partners Top Gun 51 Award winner, spoke with Channel Partners about his work and his career and about how he approaches Zerto’s customers and channel partners every day. Zerto’s products provide disaster recovery and business continuity services for customers in virtual and cloud environments. Here is an edited version of that conversation.

Channel Futures: How did you get involved in the channel?

Peter Kerr: I’ve been working in the channel since 2012, when I joined what was then Violin Memory. I worked on the company’s Microsoft partner team helping to co-develop, co-market and sell products. Previously, I had worked at Microsoft for about 10 years as a sales team manager, a senior lead product manager and a senior program manager. Back then, Microsoft sold almost everything through partners. There was very little actual direct sales. It was always through a distributor or partner. That’s kind of where I got thinking about the channel for a long time.

CF: So how did you make the transition to the channel at Violin from your work at Microsoft?

PK: After working at Microsoft and before I joined Violin, I went back to school for business school at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where I earned my MBA in 2012. I wanted to be somewhere that I could make some kind of impact using my background. I saw that alliances and channel was kind of a perfect match with my history from Microsoft and my education. After business school, I joined Violin and worked there 18 months. That experience gave me a hard core base in how to make something work when you are a small company, compared to a large company like Microsoft. At Violin, I ran the company’s global alliance program across all its partners.

CF: How did you end up at Zerto, and what are your responsibilities there?

PK: From Violin, I did some sales, marketing and channel advisory work for a few months for a startup, Gratafy, and then I became the senior director for strategic alliances for Tegile Systems through August of 2016, before joining Zerto that same month. At Zerto, I was hired as the director of global alliances and in October of 2018 I was named vice president of global alliances.

CF: How do you see the channel today?

PK: I think the channel is forming much more into a true value-add in the marketplace, meaning you have to have services as well as…

…a product solution to offer customers today. And as a channel company, you have to work with your alliances very well because, obviously, the solutions and the services you are providing must do something valuable to help customers. Just selling it is not good enough. You need to install it and configure it as well. It’s still a box, but someone has to come in and hook up the box. Just selling boxes is starting to diminish today. It becomes simpler and simpler to install hardware anywhere, so the value of doing that is less. Anyone can order a box and now have it delivered and then they can install it themselves. Everyone used to claim in the 1990s and 2000s that components were not true plug and play. Now it is starting to become true, so you really have to be able to do value add.

CF: So how do you do that for customers? What is your channel philosophy to deliver that?

PK: My philosophy, our true goal is to cooperate closely across the companies we work with to get them to digest the strategy we have with different partners and to understand the programs that we run with them. Think about us as a glue that helps our channel connect with our strategy partners who then connect to Zerto and to our customers. We make sure our teams and their channel partner teams can talk together and make sure that the goals we set are for the channel overall. As a 100% channel company, it’s really about how we balance it all to be successful.

CF: So what makes you an impact player in the channel?

PK: It’s not that complicated — it’s me helping to directly drive the revenue for our company. That’s what gives me the energy to do it. I go to every one of our shows and meet with our partners. That’s the community I live in. The energy and drive comes from seeing the bottom line of Zerto. When we are not doing it right, you can see the challenges with those channel partners.

CF: What do you think about the future of the channel?

PK: Our goal with the channel today and into the future is for our channel partners to continue to help them expand their market footprint with Zerto, which will make them more attractive when bidding for customers. I see that in the long term, we will continue this shift to value-add. I do think this is a move that is taking many years, but the shift is there. If you are just going to sell a product, that will be a problem because I think those things will disappear or become such a low margin that it won’t be able to be sustained. Just selling is not really a business that someone can sustain. By bringing in value-added services and value-added solutions, those are the channel partners that are winning. They have gone and built their services around their products.