The Gately Report: Wiz Partners to Get Boost from Expected IPOThe Gately Report: Wiz Partners to Get Boost from Expected IPO

Wiz partners are poised to benefit from the cloud security provider’s potential IPO in 2025.

That’s according to Tom Henderson, Wiz’s vice president of worldwide channels and alliances. Earlier this month, Wiz announced the appointment of Fazal Merchant as president and chief financial officer to lead financial strategy and ensure IPO readiness.

“From a partner and go-to-market perspective, an IPO is a significant milestone, but it’s a time and place,” Henderson said. “There's some famous CEOs that I've followed for a long time that said 90% of a company's growth happens post-IPO, so it's an IPO being a validation point. We've worked very hard to set up executive relationships at the top partners in the world that can validate why Wiz and why the partners are going to go big together, whether it's AI or whether it's cloud, or whether it's security.”

Providing More for Wiz Partners

In addition, many Wiz partners are owned by private equity and they’re looking for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) and services, and “Wiz spawns a ton of that for the partners,” Henderson said.

“Additionally, [an IPO is] a validation point that the market looks at Wiz as … a market leader in the future, perhaps a late majority market leader where they can really bet a significant part of their predictability on,” he said. “So we look at it as a huge opportunity. It's a validation point, but it's just a milestone as we continue to build this into a partner-driven machine.”

In the meantime, Merchant has a “great reputation” based on what he’s done in the past, Henderson said. Merchant most recently served as co-CEO of Tanium, which he helped grow threefold to almost $10 billion in under four years. Prior to that, he was CFO of DreamWorks Animation SKG and managed the company's sale to Comcast.

“Financial discipline is a big thing of repeatability,” Henderson said. “We can't run a business like the market ran a business over the last 10 years, where it’s growth at all costs. So how can we get leverage out of the partner and how can partners get leverage out of us? How can we scale this thing through the partner investment that already exists? Those are questions that are always on my mind. You can build a channel by hiring bodies, but then you have to programmatically scale a channel by having the right people, process, program and policies in place. That's the way I'm thinking about it. We're also taking time to look at it through the partner and the customer lens on how they're looking at their business so we're not just building a deal. We're building a three-year or a five-year business plan with these guys and gals. It comes down to financial discipline, and leveraging the right way and actually doing it.”

Channel Futures: Wiz has hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue and plans to double that in  2025. What role are partners playing in this fast growth?
Tom Henderson: Our partners are pretty integral to everything we do going forward at Wiz. There was a great foundation that was in place when I got here from both a product standpoint and a marketplace standpoint, and then over the last year we put a ton of emphasis on dialing up the national partner business and also putting together a [system integration] team. So going forward, they are going to be at the forefront of everything we do. And it's not just the channel team saying so. It's our executive leadership, it's our executive staff and our sales leadership as well.

Scroll through our slideshow above for the rest of our Q&A with Wiz’s Tom Henderson.