Mimecast UK channel boss on 'luring' Symantec customers

Tom Corrigan opens up about battling the political and economic events affecting the email security vendor's UK growth

Broadcom's acquisition of Symantec opens up a "tremendous opportunity" for Mimecast partners, its UK channel boss Tom Corrigan told CRN.

Earlier this year, the email security vendor targeted Symantec customers with a limited edition services migration package, which Corrigan said has resulted in significant gains for Mimecast.

"The public information being released on the back of that acquisition is leading the marketplace to believe that there's going to be a focus on a certain product set in the new business and also a focus on a particular area of the marketplace," he stated.

"We feel that that opens up a tremendous opportunity for the rest of the customers who don't naturally fall into Broadcom Symantec's future strategy to move their security gateway requirements over to Mimecast's.

"We launched a global programme three months ago with a stack of incentives both for customers and for partners and that has delivered significant gains in the first three months in terms of new conversations with these customers, and we would expect those conversations to start turning into incremental business now because next quarter would have been a peak in Symantec's historical business and would have been their year end.

"Over 3,000 [Symantec customers] have already moved to us over the last few years. We see a significant opportunity and more customers moving over during the next couple of quarters."

The email security vendor has been on a recruitment drive in recent years, seeking partners who specialise in cybersecurity and cyber-resilience solutions.

These new partners have joined with Mimecast's existing partner base to form a group to "lure away" Symantec customers.

"Customers would need a reason to move and re-evaluate, so it's been a push from a large group of our existing partners, a group of our new partners and a massive push from us," he explained.

"I think the combination of that is what we've been focusing on, where we are actually delivering the results because it fits very well with our business model, which is to win new customers, keep them forever and sell them more of our services."

In Mimecast's most recent earnings report CEO Peter Bauer acknowledged that the UK market - traditionally its biggest outside the US - has seen slower growth due to the "uncertainty of its political and economic future".

Corrigan is optimistic about countering these unpredictable challenges, but admitted that it has been feeling the pressure on winning new customers.

"We have been facing some headwinds here and there in the UK," he said.

"The marketplace has been softer than it has been historically, but we have been delivering pretty solid results. Our upsell business performs really well.

"We have been doing really well with our channel in growing our revenues from our existing customers, and the pressure points we've seen in the UK over the last couple of quarters have been in the area of new customer acquisition.

"We're now doubling down our efforts on the new customer acquisition side. We're coming into our year-end period next quarter; we've got a number of different programmes running, a number of different incentives running and we'd like to feel that with all of that that we should be able to deliver some considerable gains next quarter in terms of the new business acquisition.

"Our upsell business is going great guns in the UK selling into the existing customers, but the pressure points certainly have been in new customer acquisition and that's where we're going to be focusing our energies over the next couple of quarters."