Proofpoint lures VARs with iPad demo scheme
Confident email security vendor incorporates tablet into its evaluation programme
Proofpoint wants its UK resellers to focus on product demonstrations and will help them lure in customers with a free tablet offer.
The email security vendor claims it closed 100 per cent of evaluations carried out in its native US in the first quarter and is so confident of its chances that it is now throwing in a complimentary iPad 2 as part of every demo.
Paul Hennin, EMEA marketing director at Proofpoint, said: "We are getting our channel to focus on evaluations as when people try the product, they love it."
Hennin claimed ProofPoint had seen a spike in UK partner engagement since the start of the year, which he attributed to a loss of focus from recently acquired rivals such as IronPort and Postini.
"Their road maps are no longer as clear as ours and we are now the market's only real specialist," he said.
Hennin was particularly scathing about Postini, which he claimed had lowered its SLAs for large enterprise customers since its acquisition by Google.
"We are looking for our channel to take us into their large enterprise accounts that have legacy email security solutions we feel are out of step with the threats we see today," he explained.
Hennin said six new partners have come on board this year. These include Infosec Technologies, Synetix, Satisnet and Varidion.
Under the promotion, customers will be handed an iPad 2 loaded with a Proofpoint application that allows them to monitor their email security's performance.
Steven Malone, technical director of Infosec Technologies, said: "We recently evaluated Proofpoint and having been impressed with the high-end feature set, we are confident our enterprise customers will feel the same."
Hennin stressed that Proofpoint's in-bound and out-bound solutions can be deployed either an on-premise, virtually or as a SaaS. "We are completely unique in the sense that we have a single end-user experience across multiple deployment choices," he said.