Market consolidation good for SonicWall channel?

Fears of opportunity shrinkage in the wake of Dell buy not realised by partners, says vendor

SonicWall resellers are today winning business they wouldn't have been able to get prior to the Dell acquisition, the vendor says.

Fears of consolidation across the market relate to potentially shrunken portfolios and vendor lock-in – but Florian Malecki, EMEA head of product and solution marketing at Dell Software, told ChannelWeb that, conversely, VARs are benefiting from the brand merger.

"At Dell Software's Connected Security partner conference in Budapest, we had two German resellers who came from SonicWall and then started to work with other Dell Security products," Malecki said. "And they said, 'hey, actually Dell has brought business to me; Dell is actually bringing me business that if SonicWall had not been acquired by Dell I would not be getting'."

The reason, Malecki (pictured) suggested, was that Dell not only ultimately provides a range of other products, both from the 'old' Dell and through other acquisitions, but is working hard and applying research and development to product and solution gaps in the portfolio and in the market.

Some of this does not even require the invention of any new products, simply working out how to get current products to talk to each other about issues of remote access, cloud security, and storage.

"So there has been a positive uptake from the legacy SonicWall channel," Malecki said. "And there has been a big push from Dell to really take deals through the channel. Probably 40 per cent of Dell business today is through the channel, and the channel programme is really well established."

For example, Dell's next-generation firewall could communicate with its data protection and encryption products such that all the traffic that passed through that firewall can be monitored for compliance with security policies and appropriate reports made and related messages sent in real time.

"So what we are doing, from our point of view, is if you have a user that is putting a file on SkyDrive or similar, you can know if it has been encrypted and if not, you have to encrypt it to protect it," Malecki said. "That's a real example of what we are doing with R&D."