Sophos luring Symantec VARs away

The vendor poaches Symantec's VARs who have become disenchanted

Symantec is falling out of favour with resellers

Security vendor Sophos is aggressively poaching resellers disenchanted with rival Symantec, which it accuses of losing focus on security.

Sophos’s UK vice president Andy Bradshaw told CRN that morale in the Symantec channel has been dealt a triple whammy. By going direct, Symantec created disillusion among mid-sized resellers. Then its strategy caused confusion because the firm bought storage vendors placing less emphasis on security.

The tipping point, however, was the launch of Symantec 11, argued Bradshaw. “This is a new product that needs installing,” he said.

Coventry-based Adecs fell out of love with Symantec when version 11 of the anti-virus security software made unexpected demands on users.

“For it to run on Microsoft Small Business Server, the end-user would need 4GB of RAM, which meant an upgrade costing several thousand pounds,” said customer service manager Jonathan Howells.