Zendesk has hired a vice president of channels, and will hold its first-ever Partner Summit during the company's Zendesk Relate 2018 conference in November, CFO Elena Gomez confirmed during an earnings call yesterday.
Gomez did not disclose the new VP's name, but she indicated Zendesk will share more details about its channel strategy within 90 days.
Update: The new executive is Ricardo Moreno, vice president, Worldwide Partners and Channels, a Zendesk spokesperson confirms to ChannelE2E. Moreno previously held key partner program positions at Cisco Systems, Infoblox and Intel.
The emerging channel effort comes at a key time. The cloud-based customer software provider now has 125,000 paid customers. Many of those customers leverage Zendesk for help desk and IT service management (ITSM) software capabilities.
Among the company's recent moves: Acquiring FutureSimple Inc. and Base, a salesforce automation software platform for small businesses. The move further blurs the line between ITSM and sales team automation tools in the SMB market — a major trend involving multiple vendors and customer verticals.
More than 5,000 customers globally run Base. Matt Price, formerly Zendesk’s senior VP, product portfolio recently shifted to senior VP and general manager, Base.
In addition to lining up VARs and IT consulting firms to deploy and configure Zendesk for customers, we'll be watching to see if the company makes a more formalized push to engage MSPs as consumers of Zendesk.
In the meantime, Zendesk appears to have growing momentum. The company's Q3 2018 revenue was $154.8 million, up 38 percent vs. the corresponding quarter last year.
