Clearswift raises stakes in web gateway trade-in promotion

Clearswift has expanded a competitive trade-in offer to cover all web and email gateway security vendors after feedback from its channel partners.

The vendor launched the offer a week ago to tempt Blue Coat and former SurfControl customers off their obsolete platforms.

Customers could trade in their existing web gateway for a Clearswift Web Appliance and "pay only for support and update subscriptions", the vendor said in a statement.

But Clearswift Asia Pacific's managing director Peter Croft told CRN that the program was expanded to include all vendor products after "a fair bit of feedback from the channel".

"They really liked the idea but wanted to know why we limited the offer only the SurfControl and Blue Coat," Croft said.

"They asked why we couldn't give them the same flexibility to look at displacing other ageing technologies as well."

Croft also said that Clearswift would pay "full channel margins, including deal registration" as part of the offer, which ended December 31.

He claimed "other vendors" typically expected channel partners to shed some of their margins in promotions that affected end-user pricing.

"That's not the case [with this promotion]," Croft said.

Croft said resellers that registered deals could get an extra eight points of discount on top of the channel margin - even if someone else ended up winning the deal.

"The discount turns into a finders fee," Croft said.

"We also pay the rebates per deal upfront, which makes each deal more valuable to the partners."

Clearswift said in a statement that its web appliance product offered features including inbound/outbound http and https content scanning, compliancy checks, malware/spyware protection, URL filtering and integrated data loss prevention.

It could be deployed on new hardware, as a soft appliance utilising existing hardware or as a production ready virtualised Appliance on VMWare's ESX and ESXi platforms.