SonicWall rolls out Premium support to top Silver partners

Security vendor decides its Chertsey centre has the capacity to take on a further 100 partners and end users in EMEA

SonicWall has extended its new Premium technical support facility to its top-performing Silver partners.

The network security vendor split its EMEA support in two in July, with only Gold partners retaining access to an 11-strong in-house support team in Chertsey. Lower-level partners were hived off to the Polish centre of third-party support firm, CSS Corp.

Five months on, SonicWall has opened up Chertsey to 100 Silver partners and strategically important end users in EMEA, 23 of which are based in the UK.

Vice president of EMEA Andy Zollo (pictured below) said: "We were getting great feedback on Chertsey from all the Gold partners. We looked at it and decided we had the capacity to take on more partners and selected end users."

Although the rollout is a beta, Zollo said it will almost certainly become a permanent move.

About 19 of SonicWall's 40-50 UK Silver partners and a further four UK enterprise customers will have been notified of the upgrade over the last week.

"These are the Silver partners that are knocking on the door of Gold, and end users that live, eat and breathe kit, and we wanted to give them an express route into our best support," explained Zollo. "These guys have been with us since we opened Chertsey two years ago."

Neil Roberts, chief operating officer at SonicWall Gold partner Concorde IT Group, agreed that Chertsey can support more partners, as SonicWall has quite a mature product set, meaning its support staff are currently not overrun.

"We have had a good level of support since the support change," he added.

Zollo stressed that enterprise remains a big push area for SonicWall, with sales from larger clients climbing from "low teens" to "mid twenties" of the vendor's total revenue over the past three years. The firm has a seven-figure pipeline for its SuperMassive next-generation firewall platform, with the first UK deals set to be inked this quarter, added Zollo.

"When I started six years ago, we got excited by $20,000 deals. These deals are worth $200,000 minimum," he said.