Casual resellers: Symantec wants you

Anti-Virus vendor Symantec is determined to sign-up casual resellers to its certified partner program in the new year, now that the dust has settled from its Veritas acquisition.

Julie Parrish, vice-president of global channels at Symantec flew in to Sydney to convince around 6000 regular business partners in Australia, ranging from integrators to small whitebox builders, of the advantages to being an official Symantec partner.

Symantec wants to offer casual resellers the similar opportunities as its gold, silver and platinum partners, said Parish.

Resellers who sign up will be able to gain access to training, marketing tool, access to tech and sales support, she said.

The decision to recruit casual resellers comes from having combined the channel partners between Symantec and Veritas.

“We ended up with around 60,000 resellers globally – which was split evenly between Symantec and Veritas. From that we built the foundations of our channel program,” she said.

Once that happened Parish and her team focused on the automation of the partner program and ensuring it had a system in place for partners to understand where they are within the program she said.

"Revenue, training and driving market demand are how we measure our partners. This system will let partners log in and see what they need to do to get to the next level,” she said.

Resellers can join the Symantec Partner Program for free. Resellers that don’t join will not be excluded from selling Symantec products, said Parish.