Symantec’s global view of Australia

With the vast local presence of US vendors, it is always interesting to gain an insight from our American cousins on how they view their progress and development in the Australian market. CRN Australia was recently able to catch up with security and storage vendor Symantec’s vice president of global channel sales, Julie Parrish alongside Steve Martin, mid market manager for Pacific.

CRN US spoke with Parrish back in July last year, around the issue of the vendor tackling its much-publicised problems with its ERP and support systems. At the time, much of this criticism focused on difficulties that arose out of its acquisition of storage frontrunner Veritas and problems with its integration of the two companies’ ERP systems. Symantec was trying to get the word out that they’re paying attention to their critics, and they’re moving to address the problems. These problems, in turn, dramatically increased the load on its partner support systems, sending customer care and technical support call volume skyrocketing by more than 1000 percent, said Parrish at the time. “Hold times escalated over an hour or 90 minutes in some cases,” she said. “In certain parts of the world we actually experienced difficulties where our phone trunks went down.”

With that behind them, Parrish joined CRN Australia with local counterpart Martin to discuss the current security threat landscape, Symantec’s channel plans and its approach to future acquisitions.

CRN: What are your views of the local security market and Symantec’s position within Australia?
Parrish: What I have learned and what I have seen from various trips over here is that Australia may be a small market, compared to some of the other places I go, but it is a very mature market. There is rapid adoption of technology over here with good growth in the reseller market. Symantec’s position in the market is similar to the position we have in other mature markets throughout the world. One of the things that I have seen in Australia which is a little different is the type of reseller which is a little more prevalent. Resellers in Australia are more like integrators in terms of being a little broad. More and more of the resellers seem to be carrying hardware, software, services, networking, storage, potentially security, and they are a bit more horizontal than in some of the other mature markets such as the US or UK where I see a lot more specialisation. These resellers could be storage software-focused or a security practice-focused reseller, and they can make quite a good living just in that area. One of the things we are hearing from local partners in Australia is that they are not quite so niche-focused.
Martin: The local partners focus on the customer and servicing the customer needs, rather than just staying in one sector of the industry. A customer’s needs are pretty broad.

CRN: Why do you think that is the case in Australia?
Parrish: Potentially a smaller more captive market has led to faster consolidation and grouping of technology for resellers [in Australia]. If I look at the US or UK we are seeing a storage reseller buy a security reseller, or a hardware-focused reseller buy a software-focused reseller, we are seeing that happen now and I’m wondering if that already happened here and Australia is actually a little bit further ahead. You are hedging your bets a little more as a reseller when you do that as you have more areas of your business to manage your profitability.

CRN: Do you think there will be a shift of more Australian resellers becoming more vertically focused?
Parrish: What I have seen in other countries, not just the US, is not as much vertical focus in terms of market focus, such as a finance, healthcare or education.
Martin: The market size generally dictates that you have to do more things in order to have a reasonably sized business. You can’t afford to just specialise in one sector of the IT industry because the marketplace is not big enough.
Parrish: I think it presents an interesting challenge for resellers. It is challenging for partners to differentiate themselves and have strong value propositions. That is something that resellers in this territory will have to continue to work on. What is it which is unique about what you are offering to your customer set versus the guy next to you which also has all of those things, because the value proposition if you are not careful is going to look pretty similar. If you don’t have enough strength in your differences you are going to drop to price being your differentiator and then we’re all in trouble because we are going to see margin issues.

CRN: What would you indentify as the major threats in the current security landscape?
Parrish: I think that the major threats that we are seeing have shifted over the last couple of years from being purely external to being a little bit more internal and personal in nature. So very malicious, very personal, going after financial information, and personal identity. In the past it was much more about how can I create some public chaos around a virus which gets out into the network. Now it is much more about how can I take
a company down, how can I damage an individual? The threats are becoming more difficult to find.

CRN: Are there any threats which have come out in Australia which we have not seen elsewhere?
Martin: I’ve not seen anything Australian specific. I do know that some of the research which comes out of our six monthly threat security report found that some of the threats in the top five were found in Asia-Pacific. So it tends to suggest that there is a lot of advanced threats going on in this part of the world. Whereas some of the other parts of the world perhaps have simpler threats and a little bit generic.

CRN: Where are your resellers finding the most success in Australia?
Martin: There are a couple of areas. Security is certainly going through a resurgence. The threat landscape has changed significantly and a lot of people are still reliant on anti-virus products for their security. The end-point security approach which Symantec is taking is far more holistic. It is anti-virus plus a whole range of other things. Storage is continuing to go gangbusters, but in terms of new markets I am seeing two different things. There is quite a large explosion happening around information retention, compliance things such as email archiving and file system archiving. It’s an area that is not being addressed by the majority of the marketplace. Enterprises have largely taken it on board in the last couple of years and that is moving very aggressively into the mid-market space and we are seeing a lot of growth in that area. The other growth area is in programs and methods of going to market for products, including our system building program and the demand we are seeing around system builders wanting to put our technology in their systems. We are seeing other programs such as service providers for example who are providing hosted solutions to their customer bases. So some technology areas and some methods to market areas is where we are seeing the growth.
Parrish: That is similar to what we are seeing in the other mature markets, probably one difference about the compliance and archiving is that it is a tremendously hot market for the US and was before it hit Australia. Just in terms of when APAC countries decided that things such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) rules were actually important. I don’t think you have SOX here in Australia yet, but it is coming. The conversation has changed a little bit and it has been interesting to watch this in the various markets around the world. When you talk about compliance people immediately jump to things such as legislative rules that you have to comply with and as a partner you start thinking well how many of my customer really fall into that category? Are they publically traded? Do they deal with US companies? This is a lot more than record retention and management whether it is a good business practice, or whether local labour laws require you to keep records on your employees. You can start expanding the opportunity here and you realise on one level we were talking about just how you store it, now we are talking about how you actually index it and archive it so you can find it quickly. Whether or not you’re afraid of a lawsuit – that is the real extreme example – or whether you have to be compliant to a government rule, there is this whole issue of how do you manage your business cost effectively.

CRN: Do you agree there is still a lot of confusion in the market about what companies need to be compliant with?
Parrish: I think you just need to boil it down to the most simple aspect which is if you are running a business do you need keep records on things? Yes you do. It doesn’t matter if the government is telling you or not. You probably need it, it’s good practice and wouldn’t you like to do that more cost effectively?
Martin: We did some research earlier this year and 82 percent of small businesses send or receive purchase orders via email. Purchase orders are the core document of any business and they were in the email system. How do you manage that? How do you maintain those records over a long period of time? It has nothing to do with compliance, it has to do with making money, tracking and confirming what you have got.

CRN: With the widespread consolidation we are seeing in the market, what is Symantec’s approach to acquisitions?
Parrish: We can’t ever comment on if we will [buy a company] or what company. However a key part of our strategy has been to always look at our product portfolio, figure out within what we consider our core competencies and look at the opportunities to add to that portfolio. The Vontu acquisition is a good example of that as we needed that piece of the puzzle. It wasn’t getting us into a whole new market as much as being a missing component to the story. So we look at that and make the buy or build decision. Will we continue to be acquisitive? Yes, I’m sure we will. This is driven as much by what other pieces of the story do we need to come to market with and what is the best way for us to do that for ourselves and our customers. Looking at our strategy in the past it has typically been: let’s ensure we come to the table as quickly as possible for ourselves and our shareholders with market-leading technology. What you have seen in the past is that it is probably better to go buy something.

CRN: Do you foresee any alterations in your local channel model in the future?
Parrish: One of the changes is around our system builder go-to-market model. This is an area we started to take a look at on a global basis and looked at how small businesses and the lower end of that mid-market are really buying systems. It turns out it is through the system builders. We realised that the growth in that channel on a global basis in terms of revenue was around 90 percent year-over-year. Until we launched the system builder program we did not have a good way to get storage and security solutions to this market. So the system builder program we have launched in the US, the UK, Latin America, and today in Australia is about market-sensitive pricing, market-sensitive packaging, and signing the right distribution agreements to make sure systems builders can get the products cost effectively. Ingram Micro is our distributor of choice for the system builder community here
in Australia. The second area we are looking at is the Software-as-a-Service market and model. We have been working with our partners in the US for several months to find the right model and it is going to be a very interesting model to watch over time to see whether that kind of service has a higher adoption rate than things we have seen in the past. We will launch this model first in the US, watch it, and the state of the local market will dictate when it will be available in Australia.