Symantec says post-Blue Coat programme will offer partners more predictability

Security vendor says around 100-150 EMEA partners will sit in the Platinum and Gold tiers of its new partner programme, which it has loaded with front-end discounts

Symantec has promised that its first post-Blue Coat partner programme will offer partners more predictability following its slated launch this spring.

The enlarged security vendor is currently finalising the revenue thresholds and discount levels for the four-tier scheme, which draws on features from both Blue Coat and Symantec's partner programmes, as well as new ones.

Depending on where the revenue thresholds end up, roughly 100 to 150 partners are expected to be allocated to the top Platinum and Gold tiers when it launches.

Talking to CRN, Dominique Loiselet, vice president of EMEA sales at Symantec (pictured), said a key aim of the new programme is to offer partners more predictability.

To that end, almost all of the discounts partners earned will now come at the front end of the sale, rather than as a back-end rebate, marking a contrast from the current Symantec scheme, he explained.

"What we learned [from partners] is that they wanted us to be more predictable and transparent. Our partners want to know upfront how much they will make from Symantec," he said.

Only one back-end rebate will feature in the new programme, and this will be limited to Platinum partners who hit certain goals, Loiselet said.

Despite retaining the Symantec Secure One name, the new programme will borrow elements from Blue Coat's scheme, including deal registration and a discount for incumbent partners, something Loiselet said Symantec partners had been asking for.

'No king and no fool'

The programme will be divided into two competencies - Core and Enterprise - with the Blue Coat products sitting in the latter. The Core area of the programme is for SMB products aimed at firms with fewer than 1,000 seats.

"With the addition of Blue Coat, Symantec can address the smallest company on the planet right up to the largest one," Loiselet said. "We will have partners that will transact with Symantec five or ten times a year, but each time the orders are for $500,000 or $1m. On the other end, we have partners that will transact with thousands of end users, but for orders of only $1,000. We can't expect them to work with the same processes and reward them in the same way. We needed to make sure there is no king and fool."

Partners will be tiered on the Core competency by their revenues, while the Enterprise competency will be based on both revenues and number of engineers, although the exact levels are still being finalised.

Loiselet said it is consequently too early to predict how many partners will sit in each tier.

"If you take all the partners that transacted with Symantec and Blue Coat in fiscal '16, we had more than 10,000 partners in EMEA. In EMEA, we will probably see something around 100 to 150 partners sitting in Platinum and Gold, but that needs to be finalised."

Loiselet said the overall objective of the programme is to create one partner community in the wake of Symantec's $4.65bn acquisition of web proxy specialist Blue Coat, which it closed last August.

The combined outfit has 385,000 customers, 12,000 staff and $4.6bn revenues, even before its November acquisition of Lifelock, which Loiselet said makes it twice as large as its largest competitor.

"When Symantec announced the acquisition, [Symantec CEO] Greg Clarke announced the new Symantec strategy of building an integrated cyber-defence platform, and we needed to duplicate this strategy in our channel community," he said. "Our first objective is to create one community that has access to the bigger portfolio."

Although much of the product integration lies ahead of it, Loiselet said some of Symantec and Blue Coat's products are already working together. This includes their respective endpoint security and web proxy offerings, as well as Symantec's DLP technology and the cloud application security broker (CASB) technology Blue Coat acquired from Elastica.

"Symantec's DLP is the most efficient DLP on the planet. Now if customers want to have these policies applying in the cloud - in Google or on Office365 - you just have to duplicate the policies in one second," he explained.