Symantec has unveiled a Managed Service Provider (MSP) strategy that makes it easier and more cost effective for its partners to deliver its backup and security solutions as managed services.
Symantec Asia-Pacific and Japan vice-president for channel and SMB, David Dzienciol, said the vendor’s MSP strategy is targeted at its existing partners, as well as new and emerging ones.
While Dzienciol said while MSPs are not new in the Australian marketplace, he sees am increasing number of traditional resellers either moving their business “to more of an MSP delivered model” or setting up divisions within their existing traditional business to drive new opportunities for services around several areas, including security, and backup and recovery.
“One segment that is very interested in these types of services is the SMBs, which are generally early adopters for MSP services,” Dzienciol said.
“So what we’re announcing in terms of our strategy is how our partners can take advantage of Symantec’s world leading security and backup technologies to be easily able to drive or build these new services.”
When Dzienciol speaks about drive and build, he is referring to the ability to “integrate to what we would consider the leading remote monitoring and management [RMM] platform players.”
The first part of Symantec’s MSP strategy is being able to respond to the market needs.
“We certainly see that there are opportunities for partners to lead with partnering with Symantec’s technologies and integrate those into their existing managed services offering,” Dzienciol said.
The second part is for Symantec to ensure that it is continuing to drive greater opportunity and flexibility, as well as providing choice for its partners.
“So we don’t want partners to be locked into one delivery model, be it on-premise or MSP,” Dzienciol explained.
“We want to give them the choice because we believe it will allow them to take greater market share and grow more and more services, and ultimately drive more opportunity and accelerate greater profit for our MSP partners.”
The third key component of having an MSP strategy is to have the right flexibility when it comes to licensing and the way that MSPs can ultimately deliver a “pay as you go” subscription licensing model.
“Partners often want to drive managed services, so our MSP strategy also includes Symantec’s ExSP licensing program. This allows our partners to have more flexibility, includes a “pay as you go” system, has no up front costs when it comes to driving services for their customers, and allows partners to have access to all of the support benefits they would get in the traditional licensing model, but through the ExSP rental style model,” Dzienciol said.
Symantec recently released a study that discovered a gap in expectations versus reality in the Cloud.
