Inside Partnering

Recorded live at the CMO Huddles SuperHuddle at the El Prado Hotel in Palo Alto A New Vision for Revenue Growth Intelligence In this conversation, Rohini Kasturi shares his perspective on a rapidly shifting GTM landscape - one in which historical reporting isn’t enough and intelligence must power every growth motion. As CEO of HG Insights, he describes the company’s mission in clear terms: enablin...

Recorded live at Microsoft Ignite 2025, San Francisco Microsoft Marketplace continues to be one of the fastest-scaling engines inside the Microsoft ecosystem, and few people are closer to the momentum than Jason Rook , Senior Director for Product Marketing. Fresh off a packed Ignite keynote, Jason sat down with me at Moscone West in San Francisco to break down what’s new, what’s growing, and what...

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insidepartnering.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insidepartnering.substack.com/subscribe

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ I nside Partnering is a podcast for ecosystem builders, alliance leaders, and the people shaping the future of partnerships. Let’s build the future of partnering - together. 📌 If you found this post helpful, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience? This spreads the w...

Thank you to everyone who tuned into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app. 🎙️ I nside Partnering is a podcast for ecosystem builders, alliance leaders, and the people shaping the future of partnerships. Let’s build the future of partnering - together. 📌 If you found this post helpful, would you please consider restacking it and sharing it with your audience? This spreads the w...

The Fastest Marketing Cycle We Have Ever Seen When I sat down with Heidi Bullock , CMO at Tealium , at the CMO Huddles SuperHuddle in Palo Alto, she began with a statement that set the tone for everything that followed. “We are in a cycle of speed right now I have never seen before.” Marketing is shifting so quickly that messaging polished in Q1 might be irrelevant by Q2. Market noise, rapid AI ad...

The New Shape of Partner Marketing Modern partner marketing is in the middle of a major shift. Buying patterns have changed, ecosystems have expanded, and AI has compressed what used to be six-month cycles into a matter of days. In this conversation, Suraj Atreya of Rackspace Technology shares an inside view of how enterprise partner marketing is evolving, why alignment matters more than ever, and...

Allison Johnson joined Inside Partnering for a wide-open conversation about what it takes to succeed as an ISV inside AWS today. From the rapid rise of agentic, to how partners should think about AWS Marketplace, to the mechanics behind SCAs, she offered a clear view into how AWS is evolving its partner motions and what ISVs can do to stay ahead. A Role Built for Today’s Moment Allison is Director...

When Mandy Dhaliwal arrived at Nutanix as Chief Marketing Officer, she quickly noticed something missing in the company’s go-to-market story. For a business that runs 100 percent of its revenue through partners , partner marketing hadn’t yet earned its rightful seat at the center of the marketing engine. That realization launched a transformation – not just of how Nutanix markets, but of how it or...

When Drew Neisser walked on stage at the CMO Huddles SuperHuddle dressed head to toe in a penguin suit, the room erupted. It wasn’t just comic relief - it was a perfect metaphor for everything the CMO Huddles community stands for: boldness, courage, and the power of the flock. As Drew puts it, “A group of penguins is called a huddle. That’s what we’re about - caring, sharing, and daring together.”...

At the CMO Huddles SuperHuddle in Palo Alto, I sat down with Sandy Ono , Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President of Marketing and Partnerships at OpenText , to explore how her dual leadership role across marketing and partnerships is reshaping how the $5.5B software company goes to market. OpenText has been a trusted name in enterprise information management for decades. But as Sandy...

When you think about partnerships between two global tech giants, few are as powerful as AWS and Salesforce . In this episode of Inside Partnering , I sat down with Christopher Mercer , Global Manager of Partner Development for Salesforce at AWS. Christopher’s story is a rare one: he started his career at Salesforce, spent nearly a decade there, and then transitioned to AWS - where he now manages...

Partnerships is a lot messier than it looks - and that messiness is actually the opportunity. At a Partnership Leaders breakfast during Dreamforce, Greg Portnoy , Founder and CEO of Euler, made a clear case: partnerships are objectively the most efficient go-to-market channel, yet the function is starved of the software and measurement tooling other GTM teams take for granted. If you’ve worked in...

At the recent ChannelScaler event in Palo Alto, Lori Cornmesser , most recently VP of Channels and Alliances at 1Password, joined me to share how she’s building a modern partner strategy for one of the world’s most recognized consumer security brands. After more than a decade in enterprise networking and cybersecurity, including leadership roles at Juniper Networks and Infoblox, Lori knows what it...

Buyers today are exhausted. They face massive information overload, tangled internal processes, conflicting objectives across stakeholders, and creeping uncertainty about whether a purchased solution will actually deliver results. In practice, that means buyers who can plainly name the value of a vendor still bail at the finish line - “no decision” is the silent deal-killer. Brent Adamson and Karl...

When you ask Ron Piovesan , Head of Technology Partnerships at Okta, what makes a great partner motion, he doesn’t hesitate: “Partnership has to be about outsized value. It can’t be incremental value.” That single line captures much of what has made Okta’s ecosystem thrive. From 7,000 Integrations to Strategic Alliances Okta’s ecosystem spans more than 7,000 technology integrations. But as Ron exp...

Few companies illustrate the power of partnership better than Okta. At the heart of its cloud strategy is a deep collaboration with AWS – a partnership that’s delivered over $1 billion in marketplace transactions and continues to expand across co-sell, integrations, and AI. In this episode of Inside Partnering , I sat down at Okta’s San Francisco headquarters with Josh Greene , Area Vice President...

When it comes to partnerships, few people have seen the industry evolve quite like Margaret Adam . After 14 years as a leading ecosystem analyst at IDC, she then helped Salesforce scale its massive partner GTM and is now shaping the future of the channel as Director of Product Marketing at Channelscaler . I chatted with Margaret at the El PRADO Hotel in Palo Alto , just ahead of Channelscaler’s fi...

I had a fantastic LIVE conversation yesterday with Balaji Subramanian at the El PRADO Hotel in Palo Alto during Channelscaler’s partner-focused AI event. What stood out all day was a practical, product-first approach to AI in the channel. Balaji, Channelscaler’s Chief Partner Officer, framed the day around a simple but powerful operating model - the four Ps - and then walked us through concrete us...

The tech partner ecosystem is experiencing one of the most dramatic shifts in decades. Generative AI, agentic frameworks, and security innovations are reshaping how enterprises build, deploy, and consume software. AWS Marketplace is at the center of the transition, where independent software vendors (ISVs) are scaling their solutions in collaboration with AWS. In this episode of Inside Partnering...

At the Partnership Leaders Catalyst Summit in San Francisco, I had the opportunity to sit down with Estelle Smith, Global GSI Alliance Lead at Semperis. Estelle has built a remarkable career across IBM, Oracle, Workday, and Fortanix before joining Semperis, where she is helping the company scale its global partnerships in the critical space of identity protection. Cybersecurity is a fast-growing s...

At the Partnership Leaders Catalyst event in San Francisco earlier this month, I had the chance to chat with Jordan Spiers, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at CloudAware. With a career spanning roles at Vonage, New Relic, and IBM’s Bluewolf, Jordan has built a reputation as someone who understands how to take partnerships from reactive to truly strategic. In our conversation, Jordan shared h...

In the world of partnerships, few stories are as intertwined with a platform’s growth as ServiceRocket’s journey with Atlassian. In this episode of Inside Partnering , I sat down with Rob Castaneda , Founder and CEO of ServiceRocket, to explore how he built a thriving business by staying true to reliability, mindset, and service excellence. Rob’s story begins in Sydney, where he founded CustomWare...

Mike Reed’s journey to becoming Field CISO and Head of Cloud & Technology Alliances at Fortra isn’t your typical partner leader story. He’s gone from helping launch Exchange and Active Directory at Microsoft - to serving as a paramedic and police chief - to leading the AWS Marketplace segment for managed security ISVs. That unconventional career path gives Mike a unique perspective on both securit...