Joe McPhillips became Pacific channel director for Symantec on the back of the 2016 acquisition of Blue Coat.
How did you enter the role?
As part of the Symantec acquisition, I had the opportunity to put my hat in the ring and was fortunate to be chosen to take the new organisation forward as the channel leader.
What did Symantec gain from the Blue Coat acquisition?
Firstly, it gave Symantec a very comprehensive security offering, bringing together network security and endpoint security. That’s given Symantec a great differentiator in the marketplace. It gave Symantec a clear path to what we can offer our customers in terms of a security posture with increased return on investment.
The second was that Symantec gained leadership. The Blue Coat CEO become the CEO of the new Symantec and many of the senior executive leadership have maintained their positions in the new company, and that wasn’t by chance – it was by design.
It gave Symantec a very stable and clear security leadership, because they’d had a number of CEOs up to that point over a short period of time.
What’s involved in getting Blue Coat and Symantec partners onto the same page?
We have different skill sets in different partners, some are traditionally blue and some are yellow. We actually had some partners right in the middle of that. A good example is Content Security. They had a very good relationship with both Symantec and Blue Coat. We looked at their business model in thinking about how we could take what worked for them and apply it to help maximise the opportunity for partners of the new Symantec.
What do your partners need help with?
To just onboard a partner and think they will execute on selling Symantec without our help would be naive. The kind of thing we talk about is we have a methodology of building a business plan with those partners which spans from them just being onboarded, to independently executing on Symantec’s strategy, story and solutions into the end-user customer community.
Having a clear enablement framework is also extremely important both from a sales and technical perspective, and I think once you have that identified you also need to have a plan to help them generate opportunity and pipeline. We also look at which distributor they are engaging with and make sure the distributor is aware of the business plan and what that entails.
These are the things some of our partners struggle with. They don’t have marketers or a marketing department, they have limited resources, and limited time to get trained, so we’ve got to best utilise that time and make it efficient.
How do you characterise your partners?
Most of our partners have a security operations centre that you could look at and say, “Your partners are competing with you”, because we have our own SOC. But most partners are out there doing some kind of security managed service.
Security has such a wide area of offering that just because someone does a SOC does not mean it competes with my SOC.
I absolutely see partners representing their own SOC and coupling that with Symantec solutions.
On one hand you could categorise those partners as SOC providers to the end-user space. I just see that as the specialist with internal capability as well as additional capability from vendors.
Thinking about what Symantec is doing around that with our cloud SOC offering, it’s basically a SOC in the cloud.
Do you recommend that partners specialise?
A partner will have to make a call on where they invest their time, effort and energy. If they go too widespread it will be a real challenge for them to continue to be the leader on that technology and I think many partners are going to be looking at making big bets with less vendors.
If you have 15 vendors to get across and you try to maintain certification levels and knowledge and training it can be a struggle to earn good profit margins, as opposed to reducing vendors and going deep with a single vendor. There’s less overhead around that, you keep the billable hours up and your margins are higher.
What has changed in the program?
We’ve updated the program so that the partners understand what their discount is and what their margins could be up front. We don’t do anything in the back end that the partner needs to worry about in terms of rebates, we took that away to make it an up-front program.
We also have opportunity registration. That is a commercially significant feature that gives advantage to the partner that we have teamed with to win business.
The third element is enablement. We have a more manageable, pragmatic approach to give our partners a choice to invest in and not overload them. We give them enough in terms of expertise and strength and it’s not complicated. We also have MDF, a program allowing us to invest in partners investing us.
This was version one. And it has been received well. Our program teams are continuing to review and develop it to make sure it addresses partners’ needs. Things like specialisations in technology will become important to partners going forward, that will give them differentiation when they go to compete.
What are the program tiers?
We have platinum, gold and silver – the metal tier approach. We also have registered, and as you go up you are required to have different levels of certifications and different revenues.
Platinum is US$2 million in bookings, gold is US$400,000 bookings and silver doesn’t have a threshold. Then you have some certification required as you move up. Platinum requires three certified engineers and for gold you need two. You don’t need any with silver; $10,000 of bookings and up gets you silver.
What margins can partners expect?
The partner tiers open different levels of discount in terms of opportunity registration. You get different levels of discount. If you’re a platinum, you get 22 percent [off RRP] with opportunity registration.
Are you looking for new partners?
We absolutely want more partners, the ‘partner’ being the key word. I don’t want more resellers, I want more partners.
Through distribution, we have Dicker Data and Arrow to create programs to identify, recruit, train, develop and build the next set of key partners for this program. We’ve seen it work before. Arrow’s program has been launched. It’s called Cybersecurity Games, it’s themed on the Commonwealth Games of next year. It’s all about bringing on partners who, by the time of the games, will be able to talk about that advanced cybersecurity platform story and sell Symantec solutions.
It involves enablement training and helping them create opportunity through events and demand pipeline through a load of activities. It’s a comprehensive program. Likewise with Dicker, their program is called The Great Wall, based on the same methodology, same approach, same outcome, with a different theme.
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