Staff WritersNine months after the Veritas acquisition security and availability software vendor Symantec has launched a new partner program that brings its 1600 Australian and New Zealand Symantec and Veritas partners under one umbrella.
David Blackman, Symantec Channel Director for the Pacific Region, told SmartOffice News the new program was part of a global roll-out covering more than 60,000 reseller organisations and bringing what was once eight different partner websites into one portal while simplifying the tiered structure of the program to better suit its diverse partner base.Importantly, the new partner program tracks and rewards partner performance for the value and expertise they bring to customers as well as the volume of products and services they sell.
The difference is that with the points based system it means you don’t necessarily get the most attention for having the highest revenue, said Blackman. You get points for your marketing efforts, specialisations and investment in training, he explained.
The four tier program means that a partner can join at the ‘registered’ level and move up the tiers in recognition of the commitment to Symantec without having huge sales volumes. Similarly they can move downward, notes Blackman.
Channel Partners are now classified as either; Registered, Silver, Gold or Platinum. Silver and above level partners have increased access to online service such as technical information and advanced product notification.
The partner portal, PartnerNet, also offers access to competitive information, marketing campaigns and collateral, a quote generator and the dealer registration system.
The new PartnerNet portal is part of a five-fold increase in partner-focused technology infrastructure investment, said Blackman
“We have actually created a whole team called the Partner Enablement Team which is working with managed partners and producing technical and sales training programs. Face-to-face contact will be as important as it has ever been and we plan to run 3000-4000 face-to-face training courses across sales and technical this year.
The company already has more than 600 under its belt following a seven capital roadshow to tell partners of its first integrated Vertias/Symantec offering for the mid-market.
“The key message for the partners was that they can now leverage both security and availability. A lot of the partners are focused on one or the other, now they have the opportunity to get into information security and information availability,” said Blackman.
The new solution combines Symantec’s LiveState Recovery with what was Veritas and Backup Exec which now share code between them and are offered as a bundled solution.
While EMC remains the current marketshare leader (29.7%) in the global storage software market, Symantec moved into second place with the acquisition of Veritas (20.3%). IBM is in third spot (10.5%) with Network Appliance (6.6%) and HP (6.5%) also players in the market.