SonicWall's CEO this week opened up on the issues its brief ownership by Dell caused partners. But it's not the only example of an acquisition volte-face by a large vendor causing pain for the channel
2) Dell and SonicWall
Dell is another big vendor whose stab at being a security vendor didn't work out.
Dell lavished a total of $3.6bn on SonicWall and Quest in 2012, only to offload the two businesses together to private equity for a rumoured $2bn last autumn.
Although Dell's alibi is that it needed to wipe some debt ahead of its $67bn EMC takeover, selling these two assets a mere four years after buying them - and reportedly at a significant loss - would still have stung.
Dell's aborted sortie into cybersecurity also vexed SonicWall partners, who felt being part of a vendor giant had made the brand hard to deal with.
"I have worked very closely with the Dell Security team over the past few years and I think they've had quite a lot of shackles placed upon them; a lot of restrictions," said one partner, Durgan Cooper, director at Cetsat, at the time the deal was announced last June.
"A lot of initiatives we've been looking to run with have been going through 'policy police' and been turned down."
In an interview with CRN this week, SonicWall CEO Bill Conner also didn't hold back on what he thought of Dell's stint at the tiller.
"[Partners] weren't making money and neither were we, so that was a recipe for disaster," he said.
"We cut sales, we cut marketing, I cut G&A, everything - including R&D in places - but I've also reinvested where it needed to be done, so I've probably over-invested in product first, because of catch-up and innovation.
"I had to cut services but reinvest in services; I had to cut sales but reinvest it differently, so you have to prioritise. I think what the [new] ownership likes is that as a leadership team we made very tough calls to take tens of millions of dollars out of the business to return it profitability."
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