Top Gun 51 Profile: Alert Logic’s Chris Rajiah Helps Partners Position for Success

Christopher Rajiah is senior vice president of worldwide alliances and partnerships at Alert Logic, a compliance and cybersecurity platform provider. He’s clocked more than 25 years of experience — and counting — as a respected and highly accomplished, worldwide senior sales and marketing executive. He keeps a keen focus on the money, a subject dear to channel partners’ hearts and pockets.

Alert Logic’s Chris Rajiah

In his current position, Rajiah has earned wide acclaim for building and leading high-velocity sales organizations and alliance and partnership strategies across global market segments.

His previous experience includes a stint as chief revenue officer at Trax Technologies, a supply chain data management provider. He also previously served as vice president of worldwide channel partners and alliances at Equinix, as senior vice president of sales and marketing at ViaWest and as vice president of channel sales and global partner programs at Rackspace.

“I like to help partners evolve their business to capture the opportunities in the ever-changing technology landscape,” Rajiah said.

Channel Futures: What path did you take to get to the position you hold now?

Christopher Rajiah: My undergraduate and graduate school work centered on computer science. The early parts of my career centered on pre-sales engineering roles. Over the years, I transitioned into sales and more partner-facing roles. That path set in stone a series of experiences of working with partners on a regional, national and global scale. Those experiences led to my desire to pursue leadership roles that focused on driving innovating programs.

CF: During your tenure, what milestones or accomplishments are you most proud of in transforming your channel organization?

CR: Our company is dedicated to the success of our channel partners, from our partner account managers to our CEO.  Continuing to focus on the needs of the channel is how we continue to transform into a world-class partner-facing company.  Our programs provide benefits commensurate with investment and a product road map focused on making the partners successful.

We’ve been successful in supporting our partners, understanding their business and tailoring our offers and terms to meet them in the market.  With thought leadership in both the managed detection and response space and our latest focus on Services Marketplace, I believe we are uniquely positioned as a channel organization to help partners accelerate in this space.

CF: What business or market changes have you seen over the years that influenced channel trends in the market the most?

CR: Clearly the move to cloud brokering and managed services with MRR (monthly recurring revenue) has been the focus of partners for many years.  AWS, Microsoft and Google have changed the landscape for our channel, from traditional VAR to colocation providers, building your own versus leveraging the scale and depth of the public cloud providers is an important strategy.  Customers still desire local or regional partners to have intimacy but want the scale and leverage of the large cloud providers.

How a company transforms itself from a big iron, project-based provider to a managed services provider helping customers meet their tech…

…needs while ensuring availability and robust security is going to dictate how successful they are in the future.

CF: What new things are you working on now for your global channel program?

CR: Our channel program is dedicated to the concepts of creating value for our partners.  Ensuring they can make money, get enabled quickly and have plenty of demand to grow profitable business is always the objective.  The MSP market and collaborating with them to grow their security capability to ensure compliance, availability and mission-critical security is where we are focusing our program.

The concept of a security services marketplace, where the channel can create complete solutions through cooperation, is something we believe will help our partners increase their value to customers and to take the most advantage of our services.  Customers are moving from compliance to security-as-a-strategy and we will work with our channel to provide industry-leading managed detection and response capabilities, and a program that benefits them in the way they need to be successful.

CF: What risks/trends do you think channel partners will be most challenged by in the next year or so — and why?

CR: Interest in cybersecurity continues to grow, with new threats, technologies and entrants to the market.  So many choices, so many technologies, so many competitors that it is critical that a channel partner carves out their piece.

Right now, the biggest single challenge has to be the availability and cost of expertise.  Customers need more protection. Channel Partners have to have the experts to meet the demand.  Recruiting, training, advancing and maintaining a staff of experts across the breadth of tools and emerging technologies is time consuming, expensive and, frankly, extremely difficult given the talent pool available.  And with the increasing threat landscape it will only get harder.  We’re focused on solving that problem for our partners, by offering the best managed detection and response solution and keeping our Security Operations Center and platform up-to-date and always available to assist them in their mission.