Dell punts SonicWall to traditional partners
Hardware giant parades recent security acquisition to its channel
Dell SonicWall has launched a charm offensive aimed at traditional Dell partners yet to have dabbled in security.
The firewall vendor, which has doubled the size of its UK team from eight to 16 since it was acquired by Dell last year, has almost completed the process of "grandfathering" its traditional partners across to Dell's PartnerDirect scheme.
It has now launched a campaign designed to persuade generalist Dell resellers to begin selling its wares. Some 350 have already made the leap, said Andy Zollo, EMEA managing director at Dell SonicWall.
"With some of the big Dell partners, we may have been small fry, but if you add Dell to it, all of a sudden we are one of their biggest vendors, so we are getting attention at the next level up," Zollo (pictured) added.
"The next-generation firewall market in Europe will be $2bn (£1.26bn) per year over the next six years. Ninety-six per cent of firewalls out there are still the old generation so it is a huge market opportunity."
Only five of SonicWall's EMEA Gold and Silver partners have been ported to the Premier tier of Dell's PartnerDirect programme, which has a revenue gate of $1.5m, with the remaining 200 put on Preferred.
Zollo said Dell bigwigs are in the process of ensuring highly qualified Preferred-level partners would not be penalised on margins because of their smaller stature when the grandfathering period ends in June.
"We are looking at that to ensure our programmes reflect the skill sets and requirements of our acquired partners," he said.
The vendor is 70 per cent of the way through transferring its SonicWall Approved partners to the Registered tier of Dell's programme, he added.
"We track the number of partners that trade with us every quarter and it has stayed pretty static. To me that says that most of them are moving over into the Dell world with us and we are starting to see the Dell partners starting to sign up with us."
Zollo said the Dell SonicWall UK team, which has just moved from Chertsey into Dell's Bracknell offices, is set to double in size again in 2013.