Happy families

Symantec's Partner Engage conference last month featured an apology to its resellers for any recent upset, and the promise of a future full of togetherness and innovation. Jack Gilbert reports

Like the unwritten family rule that parents must give equal attention and affection to each of their children, all resellers want their vendor partners to provide them with the same treatment.

But during Symantec's recent Partner Engage conference in Madrid, the vendor admitted it had fallen into the trap of not spreading its love evenly among its resellers, leaving security partners left out.

"We did not give the pure-play security partners the attention they deserved during the past few years," Kevin Isaac, Symantec's senior vice president of EMEA, said.

The reason for the neglect of its security partners was its marriage to information management (IM) company Veritas in 2005, Isaac said. But things are changing, he added.

Last October Symantec announced it was splitting with its IM wing Veritas, and then in August, the vendor announced it was selling off this unit to an investor group for $8bn (￡5.3bn). Symantec has now finished its operational divorce from Veritas and the split will be legally completed in January. The rhetoric that dominated the Partner Engage event was that this separation and sale has revolutionised Symantec, and that it is going back to basics and focusing on its security foundation. The "new" Symantec is now energised and revived, according to its execs, and will focus its attention on its security resellers with more investment, a new partner programme and new solutions.

Splitting in two is never an easy task for any vendor and Veritas began its partner conference last month by apologising to its resellers for the "pain" and "frustration" its split caused. And in January, CRN reported that as part of the separation of Symantec its entire UK inside sales team was "proposed for redundancy" as the vendor moved more functions out to Dublin.

But John Thompson, head of Symantec's global channel, said the split has not caused any major disruption to its partners.

"Overall I would assess the split as a win for Symantec's security partners," he said. "As you go through the separation of two companies, there are going to be some things that are off here and there. [But] we think we have improved the partner programme, and improved the focus around our partners. We haven't seen any major operational challenges from a Symantec perspective."

This message was supported by the company's CEO, Michael Brown, who appeared via video link in Madrid and said the transition has been positive.

"I'm happy to tell you we have made incredible progress on the split, and we are now successfully operating as two separate companies," he added. "You are witnessing a new, more focused Symantec, focused on building our lead as the world's largest cybersecurity provider."

The road ahead
Danny White, sales director at Symantec partner Pentura, was pleased with the direction and messages coming from the vendor during the conference.

"I guess like a lot of other partners, we are really happy with the focus Symantec is putting on security again since the Veritas split," he said. "They seem to be focused on innovation again, whether that be with acquisitions in the coming year, or developing the tools they have. There is a lot more forward thinking around security and what the market needs."

White said he was happy with the focus on its new Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) offering, and said he wants to see Symantec going "head to head" with FireEye in this space. He added that he would like to see further development of ATP, as well as with data privacy, and "potentially an acquisition around cloud application security brokers".

As well as putting more into its own innovation, Brown said during his address that Symantec is now also ploughing resources back into its partners.

"As a more focused company, we are increasing our investment with partners," he said. "We added 10 per cent more partner reps this year, and created a new global organisation to improve how we work and we have enhanced our new partner programme with Secure One."

Secure One, which was unveiled in October, sees a reduction from 11 to four competencies, rebates given without entry-revenue requirements, and payments on a quarterly - not annual - basis. Symantec's Isaac said this new partner programme is part of the company's push to give its security resellers more of its attention.

"We did not have a security programme that was strongly focused on security and I don't think we had a partner programme that was driven towards you as security partners," he said. "We are now. Secure One is simpler; you can figure it out more easily. And there are fewer partners at this event, which means we are trying to give you more of the pie."

Andy Eccles, CTO at Symantec partner Kelway, said the previous model, shared with Veritas, was problematic, and he was pleased with the new changes.

"As I understand it, Veritas has still kept the programme that Symantec and Veritas previously used," he said. "I'm sorry to hear that [because] it was very difficult, very cumbersome and represented constant challenges for us. So now we are in a much simpler position from a channel engagement [perspective]."

The sleeping dragon
Isaac admitted that Symantec has been "dormant" with its innovation during the past few years, because of its union with Veritas. But he made it clear that the vendor is now very much awake when it comes to new technology, and top of the bill is its Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) which became available to partners on 7 December.

Presumably referencing FireEye, Isaac said this new offering, based around Symantec's threat intelligence and customer data, is 20 per cent more effective than one of its competitors' products.

"There is a very large ATP company out there beginning with F, which has been going for a while as a start-up," he said. "The benchmark tests put version one of our tech at more than 20 per cent effective than that technology."

Isaac also said that with the market maturing, the start-ups who have risen to great heights in the security industry are beginning to suffer.

"Our customers have been used to buying shiny objects that have not fixed their problems; the tech isn't making it go away," he said. "The shiny objects are struggling and some of the new ones have lost 30 per cent of their market capitalisations. They are struggling right now because they are losing funding and there is a change happening right now with the start-ups. And because Symantec is back, there is change happening right now."

Lina Mughal, business development manager at Softcat, said she felt that ATP and other changes signified that Symantec has turned the corner with its strategy.

"[Now] it seems like there is real movement and a lot of enthusiasm from commercial teams from Dublin. Being over there is exciting and it's good to see new solutions with ATP coming through. It sounds like instead of saying something regurgitated, it's really happening now."

But despite her excitement about ATP, she said she was worried that the channel may not have the marketing support to make the most of the launch.

"Everyone is keen to get ATP out to the market, but I'm a little bit concerned about the resource and marketing material," she said. "Everyone at Symantec is keen to get our security team onto training sessions; [but] do we have the material and support to make sure the hype keeps going?

"Previously Symantec has launched products and never really made a massive occasion about it," she said. "Part of Symantec being separate now is saying ‘we are here, we are big and bold and ready to take on everyone else.' There needs to be hype in the channel, because we know that ATP is great technology but we really need the customer and the channel to have a massive song and dance about it."