Security giant, Symantec has enhanced its Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) channel strategy by enabling its partners to become technology and service specialists.
As part of this strategy, Symantec is driving a programme called Margin Builder, which gives small and medium enterprise (SME) partners skills and tools to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and drive revenue by tailoring services and support to SMEs, enabling them to enhance their margins.
According to the security provider, the programme opens new business opportunities for partners, as they are provided with incentives, discounts and access to the Symantec Opportunity Registration Programme.
Chad Cleevely, Symantec SA channel manager, says there has been a lot of interest from the company's EMEA partners to become specialists.
“We have 12 specialisation tracks - the partners using those tracks are starting to see the benefits. Our objective is to drive channel profitability, so we will soon have an indication of how many specialists we will have,” explains Cleevely.
Symantec SA currently has six approved specialists from large companies. The programme has been available in the EMEA region since November last year. It was first announced in September last year.
“We are 12 months in and we are still recruiting new specialist partners. We expect to triple the number of specialists in the next six to nine months in SA. We have 30 approved SME specialists in SA and we aim to treble this in the next six to nine months.”
He says that around 30% to 40% of Symantec's unmanaged partners that work through distributors in SA have approached Symantec to enter the specialist programme.
Cleevely explains that its gold and platinum partners are driven more around technology than services; however, he expects that more partners will be moving into a specialist model.
Symantec is also driving hosted services in the cloud and will be introducing the Symantec.cloud programme. “We will see some growth in the SME service providers space, and cloud markets, both for SMEs and large companies, space.”
Eligible partners interested in the specialisation must be enrolled in the Symantec Partner Programme as a premier licensing, platinum, gold, silver or registered level channel partner. They must also meet defined profile requirements for participation, and must complete Symantec training and accreditation requirements for SME solutions.
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