Maryam Lahiji: Built-In Partnerships, Multi-Cloud Security & AI

Chip Rodgers  0:01  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, we're here. I'm here with Miriam lahiji. Miriam, welcome,

Maryam Lahiji  0:08  
welcome. So good to run into you. Yeah, yeah.

Chip Rodgers  0:11  
It's fantastic. So we are, what a great event it's been so far.

Maryam Lahiji  0:16  
It's always fun. It's a good one. Yeah, yeah. So

Chip Rodgers  0:20  
we are here in the in the in the partner lounge, and all these are all partner folks that I think they keep expanding Google keeps expanding it every year, and we just had the partner keynote. So heard from Kevin ish Barani and Colleen caps say, and some really interesting things that they've got going on this year. So

Maryam Lahiji  0:44  
hashtag agentic. AI is the thing.

Chip Rodgers  0:48  
You know, you can't have an interview without talking about AI. We went

Maryam Lahiji  0:51  
from generative to agentic, and who knows what we'll be next year, you know, just continuously evolving. That's right.

Chip Rodgers  0:58  
So I'm so excited to be joined by Miriam he. Miriam is Senior Director of partner and Regional Marketing at Orca. Security. Orca has just been doing a tremendous job and had great growth and very exciting. So Miriam, why don't we start and talk a little bit about your role at Orca?

Maryam Lahiji  1:19  
Sure, my role has evolved a lot as well. I've been at orca over four years, and we've established the partnerships that we currently have with Google, with AWS, all the cloud partners. We are a multi cloud, cloud security platform, and now I run all of global partner and regional marketing. So any activations we do in the field, any activations we do with partners. We do a ton of events with partners. Partner strategy, and our ecosystem is very dear to us. We have over 150 integrations with different types of partners and services. So yeah, it's been an evolving like definitely life, startup life, and it's a very exciting time to be in the CNAP cloud security space, and it's only going to get bigger and bigger with all the data that's coming through with all of this AI building that everyone is doing. So it's exciting to be a part of Orca, and we actually just launched our first MCP integration with anthropic cloud. So we're at the cutting edge on the cloud security side with AI. So that's been fun. That's

Chip Rodgers  2:26  
exciting. That's so it's really cool. Because I think, you know, a lot of I mean, while AI is is, you know, chat, GPT and all the anthropic and everything, everybody is very exciting. And it's incredible what it can do. I think people have the sort of nagging feeling in the back of their mind, like, How secure is this stuff? And

Maryam Lahiji  2:45  
yeah, and for us, it's more so about helping our customers, like, surface the issues faster, be able to prompt our tool to be able to show you exactly what you need when you need it. And there's a lot of other applications we're building where, again, we're the first to launch agent list cloud security. So now we're gonna be we're always thinking about pushing the boundaries, and it's been a lot of fun being on the partner and regional marketing side when you do have a platform that is so strong. So it's very like receptive in the space partners, you know, love working with us. Our sellers love working with partners. I mean, we're incentivized to do so, in addition to they bring us so much of our business. So it's been a really cool space. That's why I've been here over four years to be a part of it and see it grow and see the trajectory that we have. It's been a lot of fun.

Chip Rodgers  3:36  
That's amazing. And I mean, that's how it's supposed to work, right? You know, partners getting together, having this, the sales teams, working together to create a bigger story and helping, you know, build influence within the account, to close deals together. Yeah,

Maryam Lahiji  3:52  
100% and I've been on the partnership side. This is my first time on the marketing side, so I understand, you know, driving pipeline with CO sell and, like, refer deals. And this time, it's been interesting, because usually you're trying to convince sellers to work with partners, and they don't want to give up the deal, or they don't want to bring in a partner. And it's been a lot of it's been really cool to see the flip side of that, like, our our sellers really want to be engaged with partners. They'll throw them deals and get it back like multiple times. So the CO sell piece has been really fun to see it really be bought in by the reps, because enablement of sellers is a massive deal when it comes to partnerships. And if you have them already bought in, then that's a that's half of your battle is gone. I feel like, yeah, so

Chip Rodgers  4:40  
150 integration partners. How do you keep track of who you're going to do programs with? And

Maryam Lahiji  4:47  
you know what it might be even more I might have like but over the past week, we might have built more integrations. Who knows? I feel that our engineering team is so strong. We're based in Israel, and we do integration. In so quickly based on open a eyes and customer requests and everything like that. So actually, we don't necessarily have, like, such a robust tap partner team. We're building that out this year where we're doing, you know, mindful go to market on the partnership side, but the product integrations are there. So now, you know, it's a partner marketers dream to be able to have the integrations in place to then be able to talk about them. Usually you're like, chasing the engineering team to get integrations in place, to have something cool to talk about. And I feel like we just don't have enough time and people to just talk about all the goodness that we've already built, which is a cool problem to have. That's

Chip Rodgers  5:39  
amazing. That's fantastic. So what's, what are your plans for the events you know, for this week, I know you, you mentioned that you've got something planned at the at the sphere tonight, which is exciting. We

Maryam Lahiji  5:53  
don't come short of fun events at Orca, that's for sure. We have a ton that we do. So, yeah, we are sponsoring a sphere event, a suite. It's gonna be lovely. We usually do dinners, ancillary events around the suite. But really, we're here because we're a multi cloud again, cloud security platform. We're built on AWS, but also have a Google instance. We have Google customers. So, you know, a lot of a lot of companies don't they have a multi cloud instance, and they don't want to be pigeon holed into one partner or the other on the cloud security side. And so it's been we're just here to talk about our platform and options for people to be able to see. So it's usually a really good event for us, just to see you know what we do on top of what Google can give you, as far as cloud security goes, that's

Chip Rodgers  6:42  
amazing. It's fantastic. So you know, it's great event, great week and and lots to lots to come, lots,

Maryam Lahiji  6:52  
lots to come. What's next? Jeff, what's next?

Chip Rodgers  6:59  
We're at next so

Maryam Lahiji  7:02  
you saw that?

Chip Rodgers  7:04  
Well, this has been fantastic, Mary. And thank you for taking some time here, and really appreciate it.

Maryam Lahiji  7:10  
Thank you chip, nice to see you and nice to see you guys. Enjoy the show. It's gonna be great. And if you can go to the concert tomorrow, I won't be there. Please go. Google throws fantastic events. That's one thing they you know, really, really, that's for sure. Yeah,

Chip Rodgers  7:27  
well, thank you all for joining and and we'll see you. See you again next time. Thanks everybody next time you.

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