LAS VEGAS — In an effort to help customers reduce costs and complexities, and to provide greater visibility into IT infrastructures, Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) used its Vision conference to announce four new security solution suites and also urged partners and customers to take advantage of technologies such as Data Insight.
“Take control” was the theme of this year’s conference, and Michael Murphy, vice-president and general manager of Symantec Canada, said really, the theme is more like a “rally for individuals and companies to take control of their information.”
CDN had the chance to sit down with Murphy, where he discussed some of the key conference takeaways, channel investments, branding, and a special message to Symantec partners. Below is an edited transcript.
CDN: What are some of the key takeways from Vision?
Michael Murphy: This year’s Vision is around the historic Symantec Vision and ManageFusion, which was the customer conference for Altiris. The theme “Take Control” really marries together systems management, network management and storage management and highlights the approach to take control and manage your information. As we look at the security threats that are out there and the volume of data that’s growing, this is really a rally cry for individuals and companies to tell them to take control of information and let them know there are tools, products and solutions out there to help them manage their infrastructures and their data.
CDN: What sort of investments is Symantec making in its channel this year?
M.M.: Beyond the investments we’ve historically made for our channel from buying programs to selling-with programs, one of the things being announced at this year’s conference is around our professional services and consulting services offerings. We want our channel partners to invest in this with us. We’re actually letting our partners deliver those services and letting them take them down on their paper, with their delivery capability. We’re letting partners take advantage of professional services and consulting services in a way they haven’t before.
CDN: What led to the transition in Symantec’s services-delivery model?
M.M.: When you look at the way our partner community works, by and large, partners generate a lot of their business off of services anyways. Whether it be through our services, or services around the implementation of hardware, or the sale of software, partners have already invested in the world of services. This is an extension to say now partners can also monetize on the licenses and products that Symantec sells by coupling it with their own offerings and expertise. For every dollar of license sold, partners can make between $3 and $7 additional dollars on services.
CDN: What are your plans for the Symantec and Norton brands moving forward?
M.M.: There’s been no change to this strategy, which was laid down three or four years ago. We’ll continue to expand and enhance the Norton brand for our consumers and small office and home office customers. Norton is a largely recognized product and it’s well-respected in this space. The Norton brand is well-known, but the Symantec brand is what needs to resonate. We’re trying to separate the two brands: Norton for consumers and the Symantec brand for corporations and enterprises. At the end of the day, corporations need to understand that Norton doesn’t scale for the enterprise. While the core components and engines of the technologies do scale, the way you manage, deploy and invest in them is different. The Symantec brand is there to protect corporations and the enterprise, and Norton is there to protect consumers.
CDN: What’s on the product roadmap for 2010?
M.M.: We’ve made investments in an appliance-based strategy by taking our best-of-breed software solutions and delivering them in an appliance form-factor to get scalability and performance. Customers want something that’s turn-key and that’s designed and perfected in a form-factor that they can buy, install and manage without the complexities. Out of the gate, we’ll be taking data deduplication and our best-of-breed pure-disk technology, which is now included in Net Backup Version 7 and putting that in an appliance form-factor.
CDN: Do you have a message for your partners?
M.M.: The economy is on the return. I think there’s an opportunity to help customers do more with less still because they have less resources and less dollars to spend on IT budgets. IT budgets are still somewhat constrained, so my message to the channel community is to continue to help customers find ways to not necessarily save money, but instead make more efficient use out of the monies that they have. There are ways to make more efficiency in the business such as with better approaches to having managed storage and not having to buy new hardware and establishing better organization of the data they have. My message to partners and customers is to look at where you can create efficiencies in the business and optimize on that.
