Teridion's New Channel Chief: Public Cloud Sets Us Apart from Aryaka, Cato

Teridion starts where most SD-WAN providers stop, according to the company’s new channel chief.

Kevin Moynahan started his job as director of channel sales for the San Francisco-based SaaS accelerator earlier this year. We spoke to the company’s vice president of global sales last fall as the company was rolling out Teridion for Enterprise channel partner program. Moynahan, who has most recently worked for ShoreTel and 8×8, joined in January to focus exclusively on partners. He told Channel Partners that Teridion’s market strategy goes entirely through the channel.

Teridion’s Kevin Moynahan

Readers should not confuse Teridion with an SD-WAN provider, but the company touches on similar challenges with the value proposition of giving WANs SLA-backed performance through the public cloud. Several SD-WAN vendors, including Cisco Meraki, have partnered with Teridion to improve internet performance.

Moynahan said Teridion is running in its own lane.

“What we do is so unique that it allows our partners to differentiate themselves from the herd of SD-WAN providers,” he said. “By bringing Teridion into the discussion, our partners have instant credibility and trusted-adviser status.

We interviewed Moynahan. We’ve edited the Q&A transcript for length and clarity.

Channel Partners: You’ve worked for 8×8 and ShoreTel. What made you want to leave the UCaaS space for Teridion?

Kevin Moynahan: I had 25-plus years of success in sales and channel in mostly UCaaS-based companies; from analog to digital, from digital to voice-over-IP; from voice to cloud. I’ve managed to identify the emerging technologies, and I’ve tried to stay ahead of that my whole career. Obviously everyone’s moving more and more business-critical apps to the cloud, and I saw Teridion as a way to affect not just the UC component of that but as a way to improve the performance of all those clouds. The more I look at Teridion, I see that Teridion is revolutionizing the way the cloud is going to perform. It also makes sense because I can leverage a lot of the relationships I’ve built throughout that past in the channel, and I thought I could carry those relationships forward. It has been great. I’m even more excited about Teridion and our trajectory.

CP: Tell us a little more about those existing relationships. Are those more on the technology partner or channel partner side?

KM: I would say they’re more on the channel partner side, but certainly there are some technology partner relationships that I’ve been able to leverage. But it’s most important that I’m able to leverage the channel partner side. I think we’ve got a great product team that is nurturing and leveraging their relationships on the technology partner side, so I see that as a strength of Teridion too.

CP: What’s the profile overlap between an 8×8 channel partner and a Teridion channel partner?

KM: There is some overlap. There’s also a new audience. There’s also another world of managed service providers that don’t really do UC; that’s all greenfield for me. That’s where leveraging the technology partners comes in.

CP: What can you tell us about your partner program?

KM: There’s a lot I like about it. One of the main things I like about it is that our go-to-market is 100% through the channel. We are going to succeed with our channel partners. Certainly the source of the greatest acceleration in our channel program has been through our technology partners, like Meraki. We spoke about our relationship with Meraki last month. It is great to have the endorsement of these technology partners. When all of these partners are saying, “Hey. our solutions work better powered by Teridion,” the customers  …

… listen, and we’ve got instant credibility. And the partners listen as well. I think that’s key to our growth in the channel — leveraging our technology partners. Thus far, the technology partners have been very vocal about how we complement their solutions so well.

CP: From what companies are you trying to differentiate yourself?

KM: It’s fair to say that we stand alone, but there are some folks that are doing something similar to us. I think the main difference is, we’re providing our solution completely over the public cloud, whereas our competitors are building a transport infrastructure. They’re setting up their private network. I think we’re doing a great job at differentiating ourselves, and it’s unique that we’re leveraging the public cloud.

CP: And are these competitors SD-WAN providers with private networks?

KM: Yeah, someone like a Cato or an Aryaka. They’re kind of building their own private footprint. They’re doing great with their messaging, but I think our footprint is so easy to scale. Our capacity is limitless. We don’t suffer the same constraints as they do.

CP: Meraki seems like such a key relationship. Could you tell us more about it?

KM: The timing is great that we get to talk again and give you an update on Meraki. We were at Cisco Live last week, and I personally was blown away by the reception we had. There were a lot of Meraki folks that came by and said, “Hey, I know a little. Tell me everything.” They were so excited about it, and at the end of the conversation they’d say, “OK, I’m going to bring a partner by” or “I’m bringing a customer by.” It was a constant flow of Meraki partners, prospects and the Meraki team. The excitement is in a fever pitch. The timing [of Cisco Live] was great, and it puts the wind at your sails in the sales process.

They’re very excited to put us in front of their partners and their prospects. They love us because we’ve got a shared vision for cloud networking. They see [that] we’re complementary and additive to their solutions. The synergy … it just works. It makes a lot of sense.

CP: Anything else you’d like to add?

KM: Certainly SD-WAN is a very hot topic right now. I think if you’re trying to get in front of somebody, SD-WAN is one of those topics where people will put you down on their calendar. But the SD-WAN providers think their solution is the final frontier — that it’s the destination. The truth of the matter is, they’re stopping where we’re starting. They don’t even realize they’re not addressing the challenge of the middle mile. What we’re doing is revolutionizing cloud networking, and these SD-WAN providers have done it by addressing the first and last mile and getting you to the cloud.

One of our challenges is that this is so unique that we’ve got to do a lot of education. There’s not even a Gartner Magic Quadrant for what we do. That’s a positive and a negative. It just means we’ve got to do a lot of educating, but I love the conversations we get to have. You get to see the light bulb go on, and whoever the audience is immediately starts to think about how they implement this in their environment.