Bell Micro is to tempt more resellers into the lucrative security arena with the launch of its Security Academy.

Aimed at VARs with no previous experience in security sales, the Academy, which launches officially in November, will offer free training to both enterprise and SME resellers, at Bell’s offices in Chessington.

Duncan Hume, director of the security division at Bell, said: “Our vendor portfolio is continuing to grow and what many vendors are looking for from their distributors is access to new partners.

“The academy will work in two ways. It will introduce new resellers to the world of security and give our vendors access to new customers. It will be free to delegates, so the only cost will be their time,” he added.

Hume said the distributor will look for around 25 resellers to sign up to the Academy. The training will include an overview of the security market and different technologies, as well as talks from some of Bell’s vendor partners on their activities in the space. It will focus on both sales and technical elements.

He said the academy would not affect existing security resellers, because the recruits would be playing in a different space.

“This will be of no detriment to our customers,” Hume said. “Resellers that we already work with can send any new people on the programme as well. It is just about providing education to more resellers and I see an educated reseller base as being a good thing.”

He added that Bell is also developing a portal that will offer additional sales tools to Academy members and will divert co-op marketing funds to help VAR recruits launch their security practice.

Jo Pettifer, SecurWorld programme manager at RSA welcomed Bell’s academy. “From our point
of view this represents the market opportunity and the fact that our distributors and partners want to
create a demand for this type of thing,” she said.

“We are working very closely with Bell and are on a drive to recruit new partners. We think this is a great way for enabling new partners that are interested in the security market.”
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