Blue Coat takes axe to partner base

23 per cent of EMEA partners will be given marching orders this week as security vendor cleanses channel

Blue Coat is canning more than a fifth of its EMEA partners and halving renewal margins.

Some 23 per cent of the security vendor's EMEA partners will receive a letter this week informing them that they will be ditched if they don't pull their socks up within 90 days.

Globally, 27 per cent of Blue Coat's 2,400 partners face the boot.

Pat Dunne, Blue Coat's senior channel director of EMEA, admitted a lack of oversight had allowed some partners to fall behind the revenue and headcount targets laid out in its Channel Advantage Programme.

Newly set revenue and technical requirements will be "imposed much more sternly", warned Dunne (pictured).

"I have worked at many vendors and believe Blue Coat has the strongest channel of any security vendor out there," he said. "But over the past couple of years, it has not policed the programme that aggressively. We are cleaning that up."

Under-performing partners will be kicked out on 10 December, the same day that Blue Coat will roughly halve the margins available to partners for renewals.

That decision was taken following a company-wide review that benchmarked Blue Coat against its competitors.

"One of the areas where we felt we were out of whack with the market was renewals," Dunne explained. "We felt we were providing twice as much margin as the industry standard, so we are roughly halving it."

The fall in services margins will be compensated for by the fact there will soon be fewer certified partners competing for each deal, said Dunne.

Blue Coat has also launched a new incentive offering rebates for driving sales into new customers, or refreshing hardware or cross-selling into existing customers. The vendor will also begin enforcing its incumbency policy, meaning it will back the incumbent partner on renewals over ambulance chasers.

Dunne said committed partners would be better off taking all these measures together. "It is about focusing on a more select group of partners and focusing the benefits more effectively on those partners."

Blue Coat was bought by Thoma Bravo last year and Dunne said the private equity house was committed to improving product innovation.

The vendor is bringing all product development back to North America and is investing a "multi-million-dollar" sum into bolstering the infrastructure for its cloud services, said Dunne.