The New Avatar of Symantec heralds not to see Storage and Security in Isolation

About three years back, Norton antivirus maker Symantec had made an all share buyout of Veritas at the price of $13.5 billion. On hindsight, it was a sceptic move, but today this merger appears as the best in favour of the IT industry. The consolidation of storage and security has not happened though on a big scale, but alliance is happening quite clearly. Today, VARIndia tried to unearth the true impact of the merger at the ground level and spoke to Ajay Verma, Director, Channels & Alliances, Symantec Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., on this.

Ajay says, “From the Symantec perspective, we have metamorphosed ourselves with the market needs and the customer needs. I think, in the technology industry, the most critical aspect is that the landscape is ever

changing. The challenges you face today may not be there after twelve months. So, today, we see an extremely strong resonance both in customer’s as well as partner’s community about Symantec.”

Symantec is a global leader in infrastructure software, enabling businesses and consumers to have confidence in a connected world. The company helps customers protect their infrastructure, information, and interactions by delivering software and services that address risks to security, availability, compliance and performance.

Ajay adds, “At Symantec, we are dedicated to building confidence in the connected world to leveraging our position as the market leader to lead the entire connected world to a safer, more secure future. For more than two decades, Symantec has been protecting everyone from the individual PC user to multinational corporations. In fact, we protect more people from more online threats than anyone in the world.”

Symantec is uniquely positioned to secure and manage the world’s information by enabling organizations to standardize and automate software and processes.

New technologies, new business models and the extended global enterprise are having a significant impact on how businesses protect their infrastructure, their information and their interactions. Symantec delivers a broad range of security, IT compliance and information risk management solutions that help reduce risk and maximize business performance.

IT Compliance Solutions help customers define, control and govern their IT policies from a central location. These solutions help organizations protect critical information and assets and improve business performance by identifying areas of risk, defining the appropriate policies and controls to meet internal mandates and external regulations, probing for network vulnerabilities, monitoring threats in real time and retaining logs for analysis and reporting. Endpoint Security Solutions enable organizations to evaluate, protect and remediate both managed and unmanaged systems as they connect to corporate assets. Our solutions integrate antivirus, anti-spyware, firewall, intrusion prevention, data loss prevention and network access control technologies to simplify management and improve overall protection. Client machines, servers and mobile devices are all protected by Symantec’s award-winning technologies.

Information Risk Management Solutions enable organizations to minimize the risk of external threats, locate and prevent the loss of sensitive information, as well as manage, retain and discover that information, when needed. Our solutions leverage our market-leading anti-spam, data loss prevention, policy management, archiving and e-Discovery technologies to help protect and manage our customers’ most valuable asset– their information.

According to Ajay, Symantec’s Data Center Management Solutions help organizations gain control, improve service levels and drive down costs within complex data center environments across heterogeneous storage and server platforms. Symantec enables companies to standardize on a single layer of infrastructure software that works on every operating system and supports every major storage device, every major virtual machine vendor, every major database and every major application.

The company’s Data Protection Solutions ensure that information is always protected and always available. Products are designed to continuously protect, back up, archive and restore data across a broad range of computing environments – from large corporate data centers to remote groups and desktop and laptop computers.

Symantec Storage Management Solutions ensure that data is going to the right place at the right time and is never lost. Products deliver storage management, storage resource management and storage utilization, SAN management, storage virtualization and replication.

Similarly, the Server Management products provide enterprise customers the ability to discover in detail what is running on all the servers in their data center, actively manage and administer those servers and ensure that mission-critical applications are always available. These products provide virtualization, high-availability clustering, patch management, server provisioning and server management across heterogeneous storage and server platforms.

The company’s focus is be on providing the depth and width of solutions with the help of its channel partners throughout the country. On the one hand Symantec will focus on an extensive range of services to provide end-to-end solutions specifically suited to meet the needs of the particular segment or client. And, on the other hand, it will try to expand the reach of its products by increasing its channel base. Symantec has a very well distributed channel eco-system in the country, and Ajay says, “Our success in the country owes in large part to the great work done by the community.”

He maintains, “We follow a mixed distribution model. For our retail business, we have a three-tier distribution model, with Distributors, Sub-Distributors and Resellers, while for the enterprise business we have a two-tier Distributor model.” The company also works with Global Strategic Partners, SIs as well as Value Added Resellers.

The manner the security market is changing, the partners in this domain need to remain abreast of the trend on a regular basis. Symantec understands this very well and therefore conducts well over 250 training programmes for its partners every year. Symantec encourages all of its partners to join the Symantec Partner Programme. According to Ajay, in the last couple of months, the company has conducted training programmes in more than 12 cities. The purpose of such training programmes is to spread awareness on the new technology and trends in the market, along with adequate product information.

Also, the company has designed a Rebate Programme called Aspire that will reward its channel partners for their commitment and achievement and to help them grow their business.

Ajay says, “Our partners are spread across the country and we want to assure them that we are looking at their business growth as well. We strongly believe that Symantec’s growth is based on our partners’ commitment and efforts and the Aspire programme is a step in sharing the gains as we grow the business. The whole idea behind the Aspire Rebate programme is to give them a set target to achieve and reward them on fulfilling it.”

In today’s environment, all entities across market verticals have great dependence on the usage of technology solutions and Symantec’s value as the technology Provider of choice to manage IT risks around Infrastructure, Information and Interactions from a perspective of Availability, Security, Performance and Compliance has great growth potential for all our partners.

However, the company expects all-round growth to continue in the industry. As organizations are maturing in their technology adoption and usage, there is greater criticality as far as their information and IT infrastructure is concerned.

According to Ajay, there is a strong traction across verticals. The facet of the threat landscape morphing constantly, and the vectors of attack changing, means that organizations would need to constantly evolve their security posture.

Finally…
Symantec has always focussing on how it can help its partners grow in the country. During the current year, the company has brought in great focus on creating greater enablement capability and significant change in the overall awareness. The company has also added great value to its partners through the Opportunity Registration and Aspire programme. Some of its acquisitions such as Altiris have created a lot of revenue opportunities for its partners since it allows them to address a larger need area for customers Ajay says, “We would continue to look at non-linear growth and we see significant revenue inflows from areas such as Information Management as well as Data Loss Prevention. Symantec’s acquisition of Vontu would have a strong value for our customers who are looking at creating robust risk management profiles in this area. Compliance and Archiving are other strong market drivers.” The company is also seeing deepening of the B and C business and the Channel community scaling to greater levels in both the business services being offered as well as skills and competence in different areas of technology solutions.