Sports therapy for the channel

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.

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