As I travel around the Asia-Pacific and Japan region and meet with Smartsheet customers and partners, I’ve seen firsthand the impact of our AI-powered platform on hundreds of thousands of users. Their creativity and passion for the platform makes me enthusiastic for the future of Smartsheet and our growth objectives. It’s clear this excitement has played a big part in the growth the company has experienced across the region. We opened our first APJ office in Sydney five years ago, and since then we’ve seen more than 260% customer growth in Australia and New Zealand, with nearly 250% growth across APJ. To help us build on this strong foundation, we have welcomed nearly 100 partners across 20 countries to the Smartsheet Aligned ecosystem, and have recently opened an office in Japan. And we’re just getting started

As I look forward to the future, I am excited to share our multi-point strategy for building on our progress, including investing in our product pipeline and further expanding our partner ecosystem.

Powering enterprises at scale

Over the past five years, our teams have worked with some of the most celebrated brands in the region to help solve their collaboration and business challenges, including Fiji Airways, First Sentier Investors, Foxtel Group, the Western Australian Mental Health Commission, Wine Australia, University of Adelaide, and more.

Smartsheet has helped organisations like these work intelligently and efficiently by redefining how work gets done. By combining AI-powered intelligence, enterprise-grade capabilities, and a commitment to user empowerment, Smartsheet enables teams to easily collaborate on multiple projects, ensuring everyone can access key data required to make smart decisions, and automating and facilitating communication — without sacrificing security or privacy.

For example, Smartsheet was integral to Foxtel Group in unifying 40 disparate projects into a single tool. As a result, Foxtel Group gained full portfolio- and project-level visibility, including live dashboards to surface data, facilitate alignment, and improve decision-making.

For the past decade, Fiji Airways, one of the world’s premier airlines, has used Smartsheet to transform its operations and create efficiencies throughout its business. Crews are able to use Smartsheet to fill out voyage reports on the go and seamlessly synchronise them when online. This increases report completions and allows for instant distribution to relevant stakeholders, improving efficiency and real-time accessibility. Ultimately, Fiji Airways has been able to cut reporting time down from 3-5 days to mere hours, a 95% time savings.

Driving product innovation

In the past five years, work has changed significantly, presenting new, often unforeseen challenges for businesses. In response to these changes, and in anticipation of those to come, Smartsheet has developed our most robust and user-friendly platform yet. Guided by customer feedback, we’ve redesigned the user experience, introduced new views, and embedded AI at the core. We are continually evolving, enhancing collaboration across work, content, and resources. We also facilitate enterprise-grade integrations with other platforms, ensuring that as organisations grow and their needs change, Smartsheet scales seamlessly with them.

Thanks to the growing interest in our products and solutions, we’re excited to introduce our flagship events, Smartsheet Summits, into new countries this year. The event lineup will now include Australia, Singapore, and Japan. These in-person events provide immersive experiences for customers and partners to learn more about Smartsheet technology and to hear from customers how their experiences are driving success in their industries and countries. Register for the Melbourne, Sydney, or Singapore Summit. Registration for our Japan Summit will be available soon.

Taking our partner ecosystem to new heights

Smartsheet Aligned, our partner program, includes an ecosystem of solution partners, system integrators, and referral partners. This network of expertise enables businesses to connect work, people, and technology, accelerating ROI by building bridges between solutions and companies.

The partner ecosystem in APJ has seen a 30% year-over-year growth rate. Building on this momentum and our deep commitment to partners, we’ve set an ambitious goal to triple their contribution within the next three years.

Partners will be central to our future success in the APJ region. A key element of our strategy involves actively recruiting larger organisations, with a strong emphasis on Global System Integrators (GSIs). To fuel our international expansion, particularly across Asia, we have introduced partner-only countries, like Indonesia and the Philippines, operating exclusively through strategic in-country partners to drive business growth and expansion.

Furthermore, we will look to deepen the engagement with our strategic partners at an executive level, fostering robust relationships with leaders. We will also strengthen our foundational support by providing enhanced tools and training, empowering our internal teams and partners to collaborate effectively, drive mutual growth, and ensure exceptional customer satisfaction. For example, we plan to host partner bootcamps across APJ, including in Japan, Vietnam, and Australia in the coming quarters. The bootcamps give us an opportunity to enlist our partners in our program, roadmap, mission, and vision, and give them the chance to collaborate and learn so we can maximise our potential together.

We will double down with our focus on our partner ecosystem to drive innovation and growth. By investing in our partner network expansion, we can deliver greater value and support to our customers and fuel achievement of their business goals.

I’m proud to celebrate these milestones and company momentum across the region. This success wouldn’t be possible without our dedicated, high-performing team and the trust of our customers. We’re committed to continually earning their business.

Learn more about Smartsheet and register to secure your free place at our upcoming Melbourne, Sydney, and Singapore Summits.