AVG restructures sales team

Changes designed to help partners move into managed services

AVG has completed a restructure of its UK sales team as it forges on with its transition from an anti-virus to a cloud SaaS vendor.

The vendor also claimed it will become simpler for partners to sell its full range of services as it fuses its CloudCare and Managed Workplace programmes, the latter of which came through its acquisition of remote management and monitoring (RMM) vendor Level Platforms last June.

Talking to CRN, Mike Foreman, general manager of SMB at AVG, said the salesforce rejig is an investment, not a downsizing. While existing roles have been reassigned, new staff with a background in managed services have also been enlisted to support AVG's new focus, he said.

"We spent last year absorbing the acquisition and building out the team and this quarter we have laid out the foundations to go forward with this team," Foreman explained.

"It's all about enabling our channel to move from break-fix to being service providers. Or, if they have already done this, to offering more services through our CloudCare and Managed Workplace platforms. We've hired individuals from big-name companies such as Cisco who have come out of managed services."

Foreman indicated that Managed Workplace would be fully integrated with CloudCare by October, handing partners access to AVG's full range of services under one pane of glass.

CloudCare partners working with rival RMM vendors such as GFI will not be forced to sell AVG across the board, he stressed.

"We made a commitment when we did the acquisition to have an open ecosystem," he said. "We're not forcing them to pick us over another vendor if they prefer them for a certain service or, maybe, the customer is dictating it."

Launched in October 2012, CloudCare currently has 3,500 partners globally, about a third of which are based in the UK. Adding in AVG's legacy on-premise anti-virus business, that tally rises to 10,000.

"It's a numbers game on the anti-virus side but for CloudCare we are looking for quality," Foreman said.