By Symantec Guest Blog 2

Here at Symantec, the recent arrival of Steve Bennett as our new CEO has provided an opportunity to reinvigorate our company strategy and demonstrate our dedication to partners and shareholders. With Steve Bennett at the helm, we are reexamining ourselves from the inside out, looking at how we can augment our channel programs to better help our partners achieve success.

This is a perfect opportunity for all of us in the partner community to reassess the value add we can bring to each other, as providers and resellers. The technology ecosystem in the data center has changed dramatically in recent years, and that has affected our partners’ business models.

In this ever-changing environment, VARs are feverishly working to meet customer demands and looking to partner with the right vendors to enhance their breadth of offerings.

Our R&D, Your Success

As VARs expand their technology portfolios, Symantec is also deepening its commitment to developing best-in-breed solutions that address security, storage and productivity issues for customers of all sizes. Our extensive partner community is poised to deliver unmatched service through a level of protection that is available in physical, virtual, or cloud environments.

With Symantec Endpoint Protection.cloud, for example, partners can deploy solutions on premise or in the cloud with a single license key, maximizing flexibility for their customers. Symantec solutions are constantly evolving – allowing VARs to  plan for the future while providing them with the tools to compete right now.

Our commitment to helping our partners drive new revenue streams is evident through our CloudSmart e-learning course, which is an indispensable tool for partners looking to break into the cloud space. We’ve seen a tremendous response to this program, with over 300 partners having recently completed the course. We have also paved the way for partners to give their customers a more hands-on experience of Symantec solutions by offering 30-day trials of our cloud-based backup and security tools, through the Partner Management Console.

Organizations are always going to insist on managing certain processes, but many are starting to realize that they can successfully outsource business functions via storage-as-a-service and applications-as-a-service. Partners have already built relationships of trust with their customers, who depend on them for the solutions they need; this provides additional opportunities to strengthen those relationships by making technology recommendations that bolster productivity and allow customers to maintain a high security posture.

It’s an exciting time to be engaged with our partners, and there are new opportunities being presented every day that allow Symantec partners to grow their business and achieve a high level of success. We are looking forward to what is ahead and will continue to work with the valuable partner community to expand upon our tradition of protecting businesses and their critical information and innovate the products and solutions that support this tradition.

john eldh symantec channel chief