Hi, and welcome to the Bridge. I'm Scott Kinka. In this episode, I speak with Craig Patterson. Craig is the Senior Vice President of Global Channel Sales for Aryaka. He’s an interesting high energy, great guy, hockey dad, technologist. He runs his own podcast, incidentally, called Dreamers and Doers. He's invited me to be on that podcast. I've started listening, really good. So check that out. And joining him on his pod might be fun, Dreamers and Doers. But the fact that he's a pod show host should give you a little bit of perspective on this guy's personality. We'll get back to that in a minute.

But in terms of Aryaka, he joined during the pandemic, and he said he is the "great resignation". I don't want to steal his thunder about why he did it and what he was doing; he talks about that in the pod. I'm sure you'll find it interesting, maybe even a little bit personal. Maybe you've thought about it. Maybe you were part of the great resignation.

Maybe you were swept up in some of the fall of 22 tech layoffs. Just interesting feedback from a serious technologist, and somebody who's been very successful in this industry, about the decisions he made during the pandemic. In terms of Aryaka, interesting name, right? It means noble or truthful in Hindi. Aryaka is a global SDWAN.

Winner of Gartner's voice at the customer award multiple times, they generate about 90% of their revenue through partners like Bridgepointe. I asked him how his business changed as I’ve asked most of my guests during the pandemic. And his answer was interesting and it was immediate. “Fundamentally” was his answer.

As an SDWAN provider, Aryaka was, in his words, in the business of connecting big, shiny buildings. And then everybody went right, so they needed to sort of adjust the product. They quickly added VPN as a service offering, and integrated it into the same network fabric.

Ultimately, that became a security and application optimization fabric, and, really became the trappings of what would become a SASE service for them. And, you know, we talked a lot of this sort of conversion, even on the network and data center side. As you've heard from some of our recent guests around having to change their entire strategy to be around applications during the pandemic. A big selling point for them is that they've optimized something like 3,500 applications for delivery, allowing their customers to decide what's important and what's not in terms of delivering access down to their end users.

They feel very strongly because of that influence on some of the success that some of the SaaS companies had during the pandemic. His belief, one that I hold as well, is that the pandemic accelerated technology projects that didn't have an impending event, like tearing down traditional WANs in favor of next generation networking or shutting down local data centers and applications in favor of cloud. It's not like there was a lot of question that these applications or these conversions or these digital transformations made sense. It was just that there wasn't a good reason to just start doing it at that moment, and frankly, the pandemic brought that along.

Aryaka is betting on businesses leaving people at home and unifying that experience with the office. Their belief is that 29% of businesses are deploying SASE today while, another 50% will do so in the next 12 to 24 months. I wonder what that means for the future of former next gen networking technologies like MPLS.

And, in fact, that was a fact that he doubled down on in the shameless predictions sections. Again, his words, not mine: “legacy networks are dead”. That's a direct quote and I'm sure the Bridge production team is going to have a lot of fun with that quote in post production. We bantered a bit about how business travel is back. We talked about Oktoberfest. We mopped up with a little bit of Apple music, eighties hair bands, beer league hockey. His desire to be the third line center on his hometown avalanche. Craig's a high energy guy. It was early in the morning for me. It was two hours earlier for him, but he's a 5:00 AM hockey dad getting to the rink early in Colorado, so he wins that battle.

Let's get to it, my conversation with the very energetic Craig Patterson SVP of Global Channel Sales for Aryaka.

ABOUT CRAIG:

Craig Patterson is an award-winning, results-driven, and motivational sales leader, currently serving as Aryaka’s SVP Global Channels. In this role, Patterson is responsible for Aryaka’s global Channel Strategy, market growth, and mobilization of channel sales and marketing teams across North America, EMEA and APAC. He is credited with launching Aryaka’s Accelerate Channel Partner Program which earned the prestigious 5-STAR CRN Award in 2022. Patterson is also a recipient of the 2022 CRN Channel Chief Award and 2022 Channel Futures: Circle of Excellence Award for dedication, industry stature and accomplishments as a channel advocate. Prior to joining Aryaka, Patterson was the West Division Vice President for Lumen’s indirect channel, where he led the global sales and revenue strategy for a $1billion organization within the Lumen Channel Partner Program. Patterson is a passionate supporter and contributor to philanthropic efforts, and currently serves on the board for the Colorado Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA). He resides in Colorado with his family.

CONTACT CRAIG: 

eMail: [email protected]
Web: www.aryaka.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/globalchannel/