What makes you successful among the channel community?
Fortinet understands the importance of leveraging the strengths of the partner to service and support customers successfully. Hence utmost effort is placed on building an ecosystem where partners have technical guidance, support, knowledge sharing, incentives, rewards and business growth partnering with Fortinet. Â We have in place a strong partner program for India which is the pillar of our success story with the partner community.
What are some of the Channel initiatives Fortinet has started?
Partner Advisory Council - Set up in May 2013, this council consists of 13 key Fortinet partners who have been selected for their in-depth understanding of the IT security business. These partners will help Fortinet’s senior management fine-tune and localize the firm's go-to-market strategy for its security solutions ? nation-wide and across all verticals.
Deal Registration - An automated deal registration tool that allows channel partners to identify new business opportunities and lock these deals. This helps to protect the business interest of partners in large deals.
Reward Program - Fortinet is presently doing reward programs directly with the partners. The company is giving out $100 for setting up a new meeting opportunity for an under-$100K deal and on deal closure, the partner will earn 3% of the invoice total. And for new businesses over $100K, the partner gets $1000 for setting up a meeting on a new opportunity and another $3000 once the appliance is placed into the opportunity.
Renewal Tracking - Fortinet has also developed an intuitive web-based interface -the Renewal Asset Tracking Tool- to help the resellers identify renewal income opportunities through unit and subscription services tracking, view on FortiCare/FortiGuard contracts information and identification of upgrade/up sell opportunities.
Any message you would like to convey to the Channel?
The Fortinet product basket today offers a wide range of network security solutions. Partners no longer need to look at us simply as a pure play UTM vendor. Fortinet has a diversified portfolio of end-to-end security solutions with Wireless Security, DDos protection, Messaging Security, Web Application Firewall, Database Management, Security Management and Reporting, etc. In India Fortinet is No. 3 in the overall security appliance market according to IDC, and is also Frost & Sullivan's network security vendor for the year 2013.
