Christina Tubb - The channel partner as your local bodyguard

In this episode of Partnerships Unraveled, we sit down with Christina Tubb, Americas Director of Regional Alliance Managers at Ping Identity. With a career spanning theoretical physics, private equity, consulting, and channel leadership across ten countries, Christina brings a wide-lens view of what it takes to build partnerships that connect vendors directly to end customers.

Christina opens with a philosophy that runs counter to how many people think about channel: partnerships are a way to get closer to end users, not further from them. When partners handle the pieces they're built for, vendors get the room to focus on what customers actually need. That principle sharpens with a global lens. For a US multinational, the nuanced requirements of customers in every country and vertical are almost impossible to grasp without local partners who translate the market for you. Christina calls it thinking globally and acting locally, and nowhere does it land harder than in the channel.

From there, the conversation moves into what Christina learned running channel in Asia. Markets without friction stop innovating, she says, and Asia's density and diversity is a crucible that forces builders to move faster. Bringing that lens to the Americas, she highlights just how much automation, adaptation, and intentionality matter even in a single large market. The conversation then turns to identity in the AI era. With deep fakes rising and traditional markers of recognition losing reliability, digital identity is heading toward verified trust, and channel partners are central to how that plays out on the ground.

Christina closes on the mindset that has anchored her whole career: follow curiosity as your north star. It won't guarantee an illustrious career, but it will guarantee real enjoyment and growth, especially in a moment where the security industry is being redefined week by week.

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Introduction

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome back to Partnerships Unraveled, the podcast where we dive deep into the mysteries and the secrets of partnerships and the channel. My name is Michelle. I'm head of marketing at Chanext, and I'll be your host for today. Now I'm really happy to sit down with Christina Tubb, America's Director of Regional Alliances Managers at Ping Identity. It's great to see you. How are you? I'm doing wonderfully. Thanks. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. I think it's the start of your day, end of my day. Great ending to mine, hopefully a great start to yours

From Physics To Partner Leadership

SPEAKER_00 0:33

as well. So hey, before we dig into the meat of it, um, could you give us a quick introduction on your background, who you are, and what you're up to at Ping Identity?

SPEAKER_01 0:43

Yeah, so I've got a fairly atypical background for US Exec. I study theoretical physics, cut my teeth in private equity, you know, the the take the mouse away and run Excel in a basement sort of type uh job, then management consultancy. And then I've done pretty much every possible job in tech over the years across US and MIA and LATAM and APJ, and now back in the US. So it's been a really, really fun run.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

That's phenomenal. Okay, so we're gonna take the theoretical physics conversation offline because my grandfather was a theoretical astrophysicist. So I'd love to talk with you about that, but not on this podcast because it's not called theoretical physicists unravel. But um, so your career is um is is fascinating, I think, from where you started to where you are now. But I think also something interesting there is you've you've kind of run through some defining moments in tech: mobile banking in emerging markets, biometrics in COVID, uh, and now identity security in the AI era. Now, I can imagine that every part of that journey kind of shaped how you see partnerships, both the relationships, but also like the overall dynamic. I'm curious to hear what the common thread is between all those experiences, because I keep asking people what was different. Now I want to know what was the same, what kind of worked for you throughout all those experiences?

Chaos Creates Opportunity In Markets

SPEAKER_01 2:06

First thing is I really believe that with chaos comes opportunity. And when there's chaos, you have two opportunities, uh, two options, sorry. You can run away from it or you can run straight into it. And I always like to take the second. It's so much more fun. The the second part is it's the human impact of it. When we were doing mobile banking for the unbanked in Africa and the Middle East, we had we had this one experience where it was an army that was using mobile banking to pay their staff because they used to go AWOL to take the cash, walk two days back to the village, give it to their wife, walk back. So I said, well, if we use mobile banking and we use uh, you know, USSD and SMS payments basically, and they they can send the money straight to their wife that way to a village which didn't have the money to have a brick and mortar bank, let alone, you know, internet banking or anything like that, then they don't have to go AWOL. That was great. What we didn't realize is there was so much graft in the military that it was basically a 20 to 25% pay increase for the soldiers. The upper echelons hated it, and the lower echelons they actually said, and I can't give you the name of the telco, but they said, we prefer fighting for this telco versus fighting for the government because the telco pays better. So you have these experiences where you go, oh, this worked, but not at all in the way I expected. So we had to really roll back a lot of things in that deployment to make sure that it was branded and that all the payments were branded for the government and not for the telco. So it's it's the human aspect is so unpredictable. And that's the fun part.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah, no, I love that. I think when when you ask people what lessons have you learned throughout your career, this might be a quite a unique one. Um I I also do think the the irony of it is obviously that even in a situation like this, it is about understanding the ecosystem. It is about understanding communication through the value chain, even though in this case it you you come to a very, very weird conclusion. I think the lessons that we can learn there are indeed, hey, like if you look at partner spend, how is your MDF attributed? How is it actually spent and how do you track it? Hey, we gotta we gotta connect it back to partnerships. But experiences like these, how how have they shaped the way you look at just partnerships in general as well?

Using Partners To Reach End Users

SPEAKER_01 4:32

So I really believe you need to be close to the end users. And so for a lot of people, the approach to partnerships is use the channel almost to distance yourself from the noise of the end user. And I see partnerships more as a way to scale without adding headcount and get you closer to the end user because you're not dealing with a lot of the elements that the channel partner can handle. You're able to actually, if you choose to, focus more on the end customer's needs. Um, and so I really love using channel as a way to get closer to the end user, which is counterintuitive in some ways.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Well, I I think it indeed in traditional models where they're basically last mile support because you have to do a referral dealer or whatever, uh that totally makes sense. But now, especially when it comes to building more complex relationships, especially in like cybersecurity tech ecosystems and things like that, you need to understand what the end customer wants. You need to understand how the channel partner can actually contribute to those needs in the bigger picture. Um, so I indeed agree. It might have sounded counterintuitive, but it's so organic in the way that you can actually breed success with the partners that already have those relationships, right? And the end customer is what it's about at the end of the day.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

And if you look at it from a language, from a cultural perspective, as a US multinational, it's going to be very hard to understand the nuanced requirements of customers in every single country across different verticals against different requirements by having channel partners who can help to distill that and translate that for you. You're going to be a lot more powerful. But that think global but act local, it's nowhere is it more true than in the channels org.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Yeah. No, I can imagine. I was just thinking, like, and we'll talk about Asia a little more in the upcoming minutes. But when I was trying to break into Singapore as a market in a previous role I had, I noticed that people were happy to talk to me, but every single one of them said, Hey, do you have a local reference? Do you have a local reference? And I think if I would have gone through a channel as opposed to direct, I would have circumvented that issue. And you basically bank on the relationships that already exist as opposed to starting from the ground up. So I think there's so much value there. But I think you raise an interesting point and a good one. And that's that even if you know that you can build these relationships through the channel, you can't just put your standard playbook on every single vertical, on every single geography. It's just not going to work. You need those eyes and ears on the ground to understand market dynamics, the role of the partner within these geographies is also really, really important. Yeah, it's it's it's a really complex web of kind of variables, but if you have the magic formula, you're gonna win.

SPEAKER_01 7:25

Yeah. And to your point of breaking into Asia, everybody in the markets where I've operated, Asia, Africa, Middle East in particular, they've seen multinationals dip their toes in and drop back out. And having someone that you know is anchored in your region and who's going to be there supporting you for the next 15 years and who cares deeply about the relationships and their reputation, it's necessary. Otherwise, you're taking a very big risk that the multinational is not going to dip their toes in and back out.

SPEAKER_00 7:55

Yeah, you need that commitment, especially when it comes to cultures that are more focused on that long-term relationship building and long-term strategy in general, which is a nice little segue.

Asia Lessons Applied In The Americas

SPEAKER_00 8:05

You ran channel and alliances across Asia for Ping Identity, and now you're back to the US leading channel for the Americas. Talk to me. What happened? Good things, bad things.

SPEAKER_01 8:19

Yeah, I've I've been gone for so I've lived in 10 countries over the years. Wow. And I've been out of the States for the last 17 years. And it's such a special time for my family. My parents are in great shape. My daughter is not yet a teenager, she will be soon. And it felt like one of those moments of lightning that you can capture in a bottle. You you only have that Venn diagram where the kids want to spend time with the grandparents, and the grandparents are in really good shape and want to do fun things with the kids for so long. I couldn't not take the opportunity. So we have the opportunity. My husband's French. He had an internal transfer opportunity to the US. I had an internal transfer opportunity to the US. You had to take it, right?

SPEAKER_00 9:05

Stars aligned. And uh what kind of learnings did you take with you from Asia that you feel like you can apply to the Americas when it comes to uh your your current role?

SPEAKER_01 9:14

It's a good question. Asia was so formative for my career. In emerging markets, if you're not a builder, you can rapidly become irrelevant. So I've seen a lot of people sit around and say, I need more headcount for this, I need more headcount for that, I need more headcount. In Asia, you just kind of get down to brass tacks and you build. And I think sometimes that can be a bit destabilizing for my career, for my colleagues here in the US when they see me go, oh, I have a problem, let's fix it. But but it's it's it's something that I learned. It's and it's quite fun, right? You're working for relatively large brands, but you're a startup in effect, because with time zones and everything, there's there's no cavalry that you get to call. So that's the first one. The second one is the adaptation of your voice. I didn't realize until I moved back to the States the extent to which you have to adapt your campaigns for West Coast versus East Coast here, but it's nothing compared to the adaptation you need for Thailand versus Indonesia or make China versus Timor Estate. Like it's it's it's that that level of nuance and adaptation means that you have to automate, you have to build things at scale, and you have to just operate with a level of efficiency that's much greater than in America where you had a single large market.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, I I think when we were doing a prep call, you you raised a really interesting point

Why Friction Forces Innovation

SPEAKER_00 10:37

there. And you basically said that markets without friction stop innovating. Um and I think it's a really sharp reframe of market maturity because, like you said, I can imagine that it's easier, it's easier, not easy, but easier to market a product to a more homogenized target group, like if you have one country with one core language, and I say this in huge air quotes, one sort of culture, then an area which it might be just as big, but has 50 different cultures, 20 different languages, different market maturities, different economic maturities, different market pressures, et cetera. How do you I mean you just mentioned you already see the differences between the East Coast and West Coast, but do you see this dynamic, this this more kind of this smaller look, keeping on innovating? Do you see that showing up in how vendors and partners go to market in the US now compared to Asia or in media?

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Absolutely. If you look at a so this is the example that I love. It's in New Zealand, the birds there never had any predators. So they lost the ability to fly. They lost the ability to fight back. And now, you know, you've got predators and they're absolutely getting destroyed. And I think that you need to run through that crucible to get better and having those limitations make you better. And in Asia, you are running through that crucible every single day. So you've got groups like Grab, which become these super apps, it's massively competitive. Um, in India, you can get delivery of goods and services in maybe 15 minutes. Incredible stuff that's happening. And you don't have that same level of urgency to serve here. You have a lot of people that talk about building generational wealth, but that urgency to serve and that urgency to capture even like a $1, $2, $5 to do things faster, better, cheaper, it's it's very different here. Um it feels sometimes the US feels almost squishy in that side. The other big thing is you know, it's people live out in the suburbs. It's you work remote, there's less FaceTime in the office, there's a l there's less community. And you're not in such a dense area crossing across one another every single day. So that pollination of ideas and experiences across class, across socioeconomic factors, across nationalities, it's it's different here. It doesn't seem quite as frenetic as you would in downtown Bangkok or downtown Jakarta with you know 40 million people living there.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

So it's and then at the same time, you know, Thailand has the same GDP as Minnesota. And in the US, you don't see somebody doing a full tailored GTM with different tax rates, language, go to market just for Minnesota, the same way as you Thailand. So it's it's interesting. And I think we're gonna have a big wake up in the US eventually, you know, as some of these titans come from Asia and and start to shake things up.

SPEAKER_00 13:44

Yeah. No, I hear you. I think a large part of this is also if you're working with these far more complex target demographics, you need to be so much more intentional, right? Because there's so many more points of failure. And indeed, if you have a larger homogenized target market, you can try something. If it doesn't work, you try something else, you tweak this, you tweak that. But it if you have so many different target markets, you can be going in the entirely wrong direction. And if you fail there, you fail hard. So indeed, being being intentional around what you do and building, I think it's such a great point. I'll never forget, I I wrote a stupid little article on LinkedIn like 10 years ago where I said every company is startup. And the whole idea there is that you basically have to feel like you're taking ownership of everything you do as if it's your own company. Because that's the only way you can actually be honest with yourself, drive positive change. And obviously you'll have the blockers and and the and the the uh the positive sides of a large company around you. But having that intentionality, saying, I want to launch this now, here, and going through that gamut or crucible, like you said, I think that's a really good one, um, is so valuable for any person to experience because I I look, I've I have not had the global career that you had, but I've had the opportunity um to work in very many different countries. And the one thing I always did at the start was I left my assumptions at the door and I just listened. I tried to figure out how do these people want to do business? Not with me, but in general, and how can I adapt to that mode of business? And I think that's another part of continuously innovating, right? We we can do that on a personal level. So I think your your point lands on so many different areas. Like as an organization, you need to continue to innovate. As a person, you need to continue to build and innovate. And I think it's it's critical for the time to come, especially now that people can basically spin up apps in 10 minutes and put like a big, big company out of business, right? So we really need to think of how how we how we attack that and make use of it

AI Deepfakes And Digital Identity Futures

SPEAKER_00 15:41

as well. That dovetails relatively smoothly in something that I have to talk with you about, which is obviously AI. And we'll keep it short and sweet. I keep hearing that AI basically is forcing every part of the security stack to redefine itself. And identity feels like ground zero for that conversation. You're leading the channel for an identity company at pretty much the exact moment when the industry is asking, what is digital identity? So talk to me. What does our digital uh digital identity even look like in 2026? And why is the channel so important to the success of digital identity?

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Two parts, right? Digital identity is a transformation of us. I mean, this right there, this is a type of painting that's been done um in the northern territory of Australia for 30,000 years. And in 30,000 years, we have recognized one another by our flesh and blood elements, our voice, our face, our eyes, all of that. And and we've maintained that over the digital transition up until now. Deep fakes are so good, and it's a continuous arms race. And the bad actors have developed basically multi-level marketing pyramid schemes to go after you. So you get breached at one level, and then they'll they'll cascade the ability to breach you across to multiple actors, and everybody goes after it at once. So the way that we've recognized people doesn't hold true any longer. And they're gonna be a couple of approaches. One will be more of a move towards self-sovereign identities. So people own it and it's decentralized identity, and you have the cryptographic ability to sign and say, yes, this is me, Christina Tubb, but I'm not going to give you the information that it's Christina Tubb or my date of birth or anything. I'm just going to say the French government has verified me, and that should be good enough for you. Or it's going to move to massive centralization and the required to do much more verification and all of that. And there's a lot less money in the first one than the second. So I think the US will move more towards a centralized model. And I think Europe might move more towards a decentralized model. But the markers that we've used to identify one another are done. It's toast. You must have verified trust, and it must be verified trust that your machine is known and that you are the human, the carbon-based life form behind the action. And that's that's the next that's the next reality. And I think you're going to get a huge bifurcation in how countries and corporations respond to it.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

That that just blew my mind right there. I've never seen it that way. And it it also posits a bunch of kind of complicated and maybe scary questions. I mean, on the one hand, the the decentralized part to me makes almost like intuitive sense, right? If you look at cool. Yeah. Um, but if you if you look at something like uh Apple's a secure enclave, right, where your biometrics, they are not, they're not, they're not stored, right? They're you can't access those. I think that makes a lot of sense. Then the first thing that comes to my mind is like, oh, well, I mean, the first thing everybody's gonna hack is those verification methods, right? And that's where digital identity verification becomes so incredibly important. But um, I mean, on the other side of things, the the centralized verification, like I can't even wrap my mind around how you would make something like that work. I mean, also because of my like lack of technical expertise in this area, so I've got to be honest. But but to me, that seems like an insane endeavor.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

But yeah, from from a in India, there's an API where you can run the API. Using the API, I could look at your face, I could recognize you, and it can say, yeah, send Michelle um some money using the banking API because we've identified his destination bank account. That level of centralization already exists. Now, how can you deep fake proof that is the next layer.

SPEAKER_00 19:56

Yeah. Well, exactly. And and that's kind of thing. And that's where, and this is a bit of a side uh sidetrack here, so we won't talk about it for too long, but that's where the whole concept of cyber physical security to me is so interesting to have physical verification. But then again, if your system is hacked, what does the physical verification matter, right? It's you know, if someone's spoofing your entire device, what difference does it make? So it's a complicated domain to be in right

AI Forward Partners And Personal Responsibility

SPEAKER_00 20:21

now.

SPEAKER_01 20:21

It is. And it's fun. I mean, with chaos comes opportunity. We're on the side of the good guys, and that's always a great feeling.

SPEAKER_00 20:28

That's a really good point. And how how are your partners navigating this upcoming potential chaos?

SPEAKER_01 20:35

They're all in, to be frank. I think that it's a really scary time for a lot of people in tech because AI is able to automate some of the grunt work and some of the less glamorous work, which oftentimes got outsourced to vendors, to channel partners. At the same time, the pace of desire to innovation, the risk of doing anything wrong, the risk of inaction has all increased tenfold. So in this industry in security, you can either be AI forward or you can be obsolete. And those are the only two options. And uh yeah, it's it's kind of just where we are, right?

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, no, I I completely agree. And I also feel like with every technological revolution, when you're standing at the precipice, you really don't know what it's going to be like moving forward. And even though I feel the same thing as many other people feel, which is like a lack of clarity, uncertainty, also enthusiasm, because I think there's some amazing stuff happening, I try to stop myself from making assumptions. I want to see this play out. We we don't know yet, and there's also a lot of good stuff that we can build and make happen. And like I said, I think every single person standing at the precipice of a technological revolution or any type of revolution, an industrial revolution, saw and felt these same types of patterns. So I'm I'm really curious to see where. It goes.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

Yeah, same. I transparently I have a lot of anxiety about it because I don't know where it's going to go. And I don't know that we have the governments in place to manage any negative fallout and to make sure that we're prioritizing humanity and the planet through this change. So the way that I manage that anxiety is I've gone really deep into things such as the upcoming standards for identity for AI and saying, look, I can't, I can only manage what's in my circle. And so in my circle, I'm going to make it doing my darn best to help ensure that people don't get their identities and livelihoods taken over by bad actors using AI. And that's that's kind of the circle, right? And if everybody picks a little circle, we can do better as we go through this transition. But if people don't pick their circles, it'll be a harder transition.

SPEAKER_00 22:56

I completely agree. And I just want to emphasize on how important it is to take a look at this from that perspective. Like being intentional and doing the right thing within your sphere of influence is all you can do, but it's also monumentally important for every single one of us. And I I recently recorded a podcast with a VP from IBM, and one of the things he said was, look, I'm I'm very simple. I think the principle of paying it forward is just incredibly important. Just especially now when things are becoming more of a struggle and more complex, just do good things for people around you for no reason other than doing good things, but just let them know that they should do these good things as well. And those types of concepts, they almost become cheesy until almost they're they're like fashion, right? It's cyclical. We're now kind of so disconnected and things are going on and nobody know knows what's going on. Then it makes sense to kind of step back into those first principles and say, what can I do that's good? How can I help other people in my small sphere of influence and just do that? Yeah. Yeah. This conversation took a took a very empathetic turn. I love it. Speaking of empathy, we always ask our guests to nominate the next potential guest on the podcast.

Next Guest Pick And Final Advice

SPEAKER_00 24:08

Who do you think would be a great voice on this channel?

SPEAKER_01 24:12

So someone that has that helped me a lot throughout my time in Singapore, genuine channel pro, really, really knows the market. His name is Ben Wong. He's the channel director at Recorded Future, responsible for Asia Pacific in Japan. He'd be great.

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Amazing. I'll definitely reach out to him. And um, I don't know, I always get tingles in my heart when I hear about Singapore. I was there a lot, I miss it a lot. I I heard my favorite restaurant there closed down, so I need to need to figure out something else. But uh, I'll definitely reach out to him. To wrap this up, do you have any final insights, tips, or tricks that you'd like to share with our audience?

SPEAKER_01 24:48

Follow curiosity. Make that your North Star, and you'll always have a lot of fun. I'm not gonna guarantee you an illustrious career following curiosity, but I will guarantee a lot of enjoyment and growth.

SPEAKER_00 25:03

I love that. Exactly. Be curious. Just listen and ask questions. I love it. Christina, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts and taking the time to speak with me. And uh, you, dear listeners, thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you in the next episode. Thank you. Great.