Packeteer VARs warm to Blue Coat sales strategy

Jim Harold: we assured partners PacketShaper would live on

A year after closing its acquisition of Packeteer, Blue Coat claims it has accomplished its mission of winning over the WAN optimisation vendor's channel.

Talking to CRN, Blue Coat's vice president of worldwide channel sales, Jim Harold, said the vendor transacted with 580 former Packeteer partners in its last quarter and that the attrition rate had been just 10 per cent.

Following a massive cross-selling drive, some 40 per cent of the new recruits now sell both PacketShaper and Blue Coat's Proxy portfolio.

"It took us two quarters to start gaining their trust," said Harold.

"Early on, people were a little concerned about what we were going to do with PacketShaper. We articulated what we would do from a product standpoint and assured them PacketShaper would live on."

Partners from both the Blue Coat and Packeteer sides have been offered extra margin points for selling the PacketShaper and Blue Coat Proxy portfolio together.
Harold stressed that PacketShaper is integral to the vendor's application delivery network (ADN) vision, which it unveiled in February.

While PacketShaper takes care of network visibility, Proxy covers application acceleration and security. Harold claimed the combination of these three components gives Blue Coat an edge over Cisco and Riverbed.

"This helps our partners differentiate themselves," he said. "If they go in with PacketShaper, it is a consultative sale and they become more of a trusted advisor."

A programme was recently launched offering free PacketShaper demo equipment to resellers that attend training sessions.

Gary Middleton, business development manager at Dimension Data, said PacketShaper forms a key part of the integrator's WAN optimisation strategy.
"Visibility is key," he said. "70 per cent of network managers do not have a clear view of what is running on their networks. PacketShaper is tremendously good at helping them do this."

Global WAN optimisation sales fell by 14 per cent sequentially in the first quarter, according to Infonetics. But the technology fared better than other networking segments as suppliers could build a strong ROI case around deployments, the market-watcher said.

The report showed that Blue Coat increased its share from 25 to 30 per cent, quarter on quarter. "This was due to our ADN strategy," said Harold.

Six months ago, Blue Coat collapsed the Blue Coat and Packeteer partner programmes into one and Harold said: "It is the one-year anniversary of our acquisition of Packeteer and looking back we are pretty happy with where we are today."