Christanto Suryadarma, Zebra Technologies

Christanto Suryadarma is the VP, Asia Pacific channel, excluding China at Zebra Technologies. Christanto graduated from the Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana as an electronics engineer and started his career as a pre-sales engineer in IT before moving into sales.

Prior to Zebra, Christanto was the head of channels, mid-market, SMB, commercial and Alibaba Cloud Partnership at HPE Asia Pacific. He also held various senior leadership positions at companies like the ECS Group, Intel Corporation, and Microsoft Asia Pacific.

In his current role at Zebra, he is responsible for growing the channel business through development and execution of strategies that are in alignment with Zebra's goals. For Christanto, success is not only about personal success but also having the ability to help others in need.

To achieve significance, Christanto continues to build his network with over 20,000 fellow professionals on LinkedIn, and he uses that platform to share thought leadership and help to other professionals. He also demonstrates significance in his community as he started a children literacy movement named "Mybook MyCountry.Org" which is focused on helping underprivileged children in remote areas of Indonesia.

He works with publishers to get new books at discounted rates and liaises with local volunteers and educators to convert homes and schools into reading gardens, accessed by underprivileged children and students in the vicinity. To date, 74, reading gardens have been established, helping nearly 10,000 underprivileged children.

Number of years in current role:

2

Number of years in current company:

2

Number of years involved in indirect/channel sales:

17

Reports to:

Ryan Goh, SVP, general manager, APAC

Number of employees in channel organisation:

Declined to disclose.

What percentage of overall sales come through the channel?

Declined to disclose.

What is your personal channel philosophy?

My philosophy centres around partnership-first for joint success and making a positive impact to the communities we serve. Our channel ecosystem is critical to success as it is very large, complex, and diverse. Partners increase coverage, capacity, and competencies to meet market demands and increase customer value.

Engaging, enabling, and exciting our partners helps build stronger alignment and growth opportunities. Enabling helps us deliver more value, and when we excite each other, we have energy to deliver value to our customers. Through a partnership-first model, we will increase revenue opportunities and make an impact to the communities we serve.

What were your biggest personal channel accomplishments over the past year?

Contributed to more than 95 per cent of Zebra sales in APAC through the channel. Strengthened our partner ecosystem in Southeast Asia.

Spearheaded an initiative enabling channel partners to sell Zebra solutions; launched a sales incentive program, focused on rewarding channel sales representatives. Helped channel partners win more RFID and Tablet business.

What were your organisation's biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?

Won the largest deployment of Zebra enterprise mobile computers in Japan.

Won a large deployment of Zebra enterprise mobile computer, scanning and software in top retailers in Australia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Won and continue to support the successful automation of Zebra RFID in the largest prescription Pharmacy in Malaysia.

What areas would you like to see your channel partners invest in in 2024?

I'd like to see our Zebra channel partners invest in understanding customers' workflows and designs and help build and deliver solutions that solve business outcomes. I would also like partners to invest in ways to harness innovation in selling across our entire portfolio including RFID, tablet, fixed industrial scanning, machine vision to help increase value to the customers we serve.

What are the biggest challenges facing your partners in 2024?

The biggest challenge for our partners is to sell beyond the box, with more software, services, solution and build different consumption model with other ecosystem partners. Another big challenge is how to get our partners to increase their engagement with higher level personas in the customers including IT, Procurement, Operations and Business units.

In what ways do you use your role to build equity and inclusion?

I use the role as Channel Chief to share the importance of equity and inclusion for the underprivileged. One example is that I help connect our Zebra team with the Autism Resource Centre to help support autism causes in Singapore and building Diversity, Equity and Inclusion together with our Partners, including Microsoft.

Describe how your use of market development funds (MDF) is changing this year.

Zebra is continuing to utilize our planning process in its fullest capacity. This includes aligning Zebra's go-to-market strategy with the strategies that our individual partners may have. We are also closely monitoring the ROI of investments from 2023 so that we can ensure that that our MDF investments in 2024 will have the largest impact possible for our partners and for Zebra. Some key drivers include Digital Transformation, ABM, Partner-Led Events, GTM transformation, Co-Marketing Tools and Campaigns.

What are your biggest channel priorities in 2024?

Improve partner profitability, increase the amount of net new accounts coming through partners and encourage partners to sell a broader part of our portfolio.