Sports therapy for the channel

Despite plans to work in her first passion of sport, Zoe Nicholson, channel sales manager at security vendor Sophos, is happy with working life in the channel.

Since arriving on Australian shores from the UK in 2004, Nicholson has risen from territory manager and assumed her current role in April 2005. In her present position Nicholson has outlined ambitious plans to extend Sophos’ channel coverage.

“I head up the channel team at Sophos and we are looking to grow the channel. We concentrate a lot on the recruitment of new resellers and set up training programs to help partners develop so they can sell service contracts,” she says.

Sporting ambitions

Nicholson may be firmly focused on channel development now, but that would have seemed a foreign concept for her after she graduated from university in the UK.

“I trained in sports studies and business studies, and did a diploma in sports therapy, so I thought my career was going down that path, but that soon changed. I went to [UK software and services provider] Research Machines [RM] in 1998 and was temping there in purchasing. I got taken on full time and worked there as one of its senior buyers on the manufacturing side,” she recalls.

“When I started working in IT with RM I really enjoyed it and things just kept growing and growing. I was quite shocked by it [my career in IT], as it wasn’t something I was planning in life. I was going to be a sports physio and I worked for a couple for rugby union teams in the UK, but it didn’t carry on and I switched over and did the whole IT thing,” she says.

Keen to progress her career experience in a new organisation, Nicholson moved to handheld vendor Psion Teklogix in 2000 as a technical data manager, before an unexpected phone call paved the way for a significant opportunity.

“I got this phone call from a head-hunter and was asked to go to an interview, but at this point I knew nothing of Sophos. I went with no real intentions, but ended up taking a job at Sophos three weeks later and I’m now approaching six years working here [with Sophos].”

International ambitions

Nicholson started at Sophos in the UK sales team and moved to being
in a team of four covering the northern region. She then became the external territory manager for Manchester up to Scotland, before an international offer was too good to turn down.

“I came out to Australia in August 2004 where I was territory manager. I did that for nearly a year and then in April 2005 I became the channel manager for Australia and New Zealand.”

Current demands

With her feet firmly under the table in Australia, Nicholson has been working closely with the channel to expand Sophos’ coverage across the country.

“We do a lot of marketing work directly with the resellers, and co-branding. I have a team of account managers that cover the different territories and I do a lot of training and development work with them. We also work hard on lead generation between myself and the marketing team on behalf of the partners.”

It has been a busy six months for Sophos with a batch of new products hitting the market, including a new small business edition product, an enterprise solutions product, a new email appliance with another email appliance in the pipeline, and the acquisition of endpoint security policy compliance and network access control (NAC) provider, Endforce.

“All of the developments that Sophos has made, I need to bundle up and ensure the training is there, the marketing facility is there, and the partner portals are up-to-date with all the information partners need. This enables resellers to take these new products, upgrade customers and win new business.”

Despite a bustling local channel set-up, Nicholson says Sophos has resisted moving to a two-tier model and appointing any distributors across Australia or New Zealand.

Any region where Sophos has offices is covered by direct reseller contact, she says.

“We have external and internal account managers across Australia and New Zealand. We currently have 600 resellers, but we are not looking for an extensive base of thousands and thousands of resellers. We are looking for partners we can continually promote to certified partner status,” she says.

“We want to keep the certified partners to a manageable level so they can differentiate themselves as specialised. This ensures there are not 10 resellers tendering for one deal. That’s the way we have managed to grow our business quite successfully.”

Nicholson’s 2007 security predictions

Nicholson says Web security will be a big issue this year, while 2007 will also herald another massive change with security firms like Sophos no longer operating as an anti-spam or anti-virus vendor.

The security market will be more about management control and creating an all-in-one solution. She says customers are facing a more complex environment with fewer IT resources and smaller budgets, so Sophos has to give them the solution to their problems with more management and application control.

Mobility is set to become another big security issue this year, according to Nicholson. Despite mobility threats being quite new in the market and there are not thousands of threats out there at the moment, while people are using PDAs to dock onto systems to download mail, all the risks of attachments in mail will be transferred onto mobile devices, she says.

Channel expectations for the year

As the Sophos channel moves into 2007, Nicholson insists channel partners can expect further interaction and partner program improvements over the coming 12 months.

“Partners can expect to see a lot of improvement in our training program. We have got a training team in the UK that concentrates on creating up-to-date modules. We are also looking to do a lot more Web seminars to present new developments. This enables resellers to get the information they need without account managers having to go off-site,” she says.

This ethos will apply to Sophos’ technology training where the aim is to provide more online training in a modular format, says Nicholson.

This is likely to prove popular with resellers, as constant off-site staff training for staff is a time-consuming and costly process. The fewer hoops resellers have to jump through, the easier they will interact with their vendor partners.

“We are also trying to give resellers a lot more specialisation so they have the ability to sell the service and maintenance contracts. This is where resellers make most of their money.

“Also in 2007, resellers will get a lot more products to upgrade current accounts and find new accounts they could not service before. We are giving resellers more scope to make decent money,” says Nicholson.

However, it is not all work for Nicholson. In her spare time an underlying passion for all things sports-related still burns bright.

“I go training quite a lot, go to boxing camps, I spend a lot of time trying to surf and I spend time with my friends. I also enjoy going away at weekend, camping and exploring the country as much as I can,” she says.

Looking forward, Nicholson outlines Web security and mobility as two key issues driving the security market in 2007. You can be assured Nicholson will looking to work closely with Sophos’ widespread local channel base to generate and service demand across the sector.