Zscaler taps Forcepoint’s John Milionis to be new ANZ channel chief

US cloud security vendor Zscaler has nabbed Forcepoint’s John Milionis to be its new Australia and New Zealand channel chief.

Based in Melbourne, Milionis replaced Zscaler’s Foad Farrokhnia, who was promoted from the role to be Asia Pacific and Japan channel chief last December. 

Farrokhnia said in a statement that he was delighted Milionis would lead Zscaler’s ANZ channel partner community.

“His extensive experience in sales, consulting, and channel development, will continue to drive our escalating growth.

“He also has terrific skills from his experience at several dynamic, growing companies where he was instrumental in scaling their channel partner network from the start-up phase all the way through to regional expansion.”            

Milionis is tasked with enhancing partnerships with managed service partners, resellers, and systems integration alliance vendors in enabling secure cloud transformation for customers across commercial, enterprise and public sector markets, according to the company. 

Commenting on the appointment, Milionis said, “I’m looking forward to working with our channel partners to enable our joint customers to break free from legacy approaches to security with the Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange platform which provides true any-to-any zero trust connectivity.”     

Milionis joined US security vendor Forcepoint as its ANZ enterprise channel director in 2020. Before this, he worked for Riverbed Technology, first as its senior manager - Telstra alliance in 2017. He was then promoted to ANZ channel director in January 2020 and APJ channel director in August 2020. 

In August last year, Zscaler appointed its first local distributor for the region, signing an exclusive deal with Sydney-based Orca Tech. 

In April this year, Victoria’s Department of Education used the vendor's tech to expand its monitoring of devices’ internal traffic from staff to students' own devices at a number of schools.

The department installed Zscaler SSL root certificates on school-provided and students’ personal devices if they connect locally to a school network.