Symantec: Our ATP 'changes the game'

Partners urged to get on board with its new Advanced Threat Protection offering at Symantec's Partner Engage event

Symantec has claimed its new Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) offering "changes the game" and has urged its partners to embrace the technology.

The ATP offering, which is available for UK partners on 7 December, is an application which uses Symantec's global threat intelligence and local customer data to present information on threats to enable customers to prioritise and remediate attacks.

Speaking in a keynote at this year's Partner Engage conference in Madrid, John Sorensen, US vice president, said this new offering will 'radically change' the security market and urged partners to get on board.

"I'm sure excited about this [ATP]," he said. "I think this is a massive opportunity for Symantec and it's a massive opportunity for you [the partners]. ATP changes the game. It's integrated into the agents on the endpoints out there, so we have a great opportunity to go to our customers.

"Symantec has 15 million endpoints expiring between now and the end of March, which is our fiscal year. We need to bring them [the customers] back and make sure they continue with us from an endpoint, which they will, and [also with] ATP. My ask for you is listen about ATP, got back to our customers and make sure you are upselling across the environment. It's a very simple conversation."

Beating the competition

Although ATP may be new to Symantec, there are other major security players out there, including Fortinet and FireEye, which have introduced it.

But Kevin Isaac, Symantec's senior vice president of EMEA, said that its ATP offering is superior to one of its competitors.

"There is a very large ATP company out there beginning with F, who have been going for a while as a start-up," he said. "This technology actually I think the bench mark tests put version one of our tech at more than 20 per cent effective than that technology."

John Thompson, head of Symantec's global channel, said he didn't have a specific target of how many partners he would like signed up with ATP but expected it to grow quickly.

"It's a fairly broad base of partners, because partners that know how to sell SEP [Symantec Endpoint Protection] can pretty easily make the transition to selling ATP," he said. "So I would call it in the hundreds [of partners] in EMEA over the next six months and I think it will move pretty rapidly."

The sweet-spot for this offering will be customers in the large commercial space, with around 5,000 employees, according to Darren Thomson, Symantec's EMEA CTO.

Andy Eccles, CTO at Symantec partner Kelway, said he was excited about the ATP noises coming out of the event.

"Obviously we delivered managed services for many years, some of them are security related but [we are] investing much more in strategic managed services on security, so we can take that risk and burden away from the customer," he said. "I am looking at which technology we put at the core of our managed security services operation, and from what I've seen of it so far, ATP sounds as if it's going to be very compelling."