Exclusive: Partners vital to Symantec’s growth strategy

Symantec senior vice president Asia Pacific and Japan, Sanjay Rohatgi

Symantec’s new regional boss has said partners are an essential part of the vendor’s growth plans and the company is working to make its partner program more exciting.

Symantec senior vice-president Asia-Pacific and Japan, Sanjay Rohatgi, told ARN that following the company’s seperation with Veritas, the focus was now on the firm’s channel partners.

“Partners are a very important part of our growth strategy and will remain so forever,” he said.

“We are doing a couple of things on the partner landscape, we are asking how we can make our partner program more exciting for resellers and distributors alike.

“The debt separation [from Veritas] on the sales side has already happened. We are now running as two separate sales companies. At the back end, the operations will be separated from October.”

He explained the split enabled Symantec to bring more of a focus to its security offerings.

“Initially, we thought there would be a lot more synergy between the two entities, but with the changing threat landscape we thought it would be better to have two companies focused on two very different areas of growth,” he said.

“As the new leader for Symantec, my immediate priority is to bring growth back into the information security business. It’s not that we are not growing, but I want to drive more and more growth.”

Rohatgi said that the information security business is at a critical point and had more interest from business than at almost any time.

“Information security has been very important for the last 10-15 years, but it has never been as relevant as it is now and will be in the next decade,” he said.

“Everywhere I go, be it India, Australia, Japan or other parts of ASEAN, everyone is very concerned about evolving cyber threats.

“I believe we are in the right area with the right offering with the right solutions for our customers that is where I think we can drive growth back to the region.

He outlined the basis for the company strategy at a regional level and how the firm will look leverage its vast security network.

“In APJ, our strategy is based upon four pillars or what we call unified security strategy. It starts with threat protection, moves on to information protection, then to cyber security services and analytics,” he said.

“We have the largest civil cyber threat intelligence network in the world. We look at 30 per cent of global emails every day, we monitor close to 1.5 billion web requests. There are probably only three or four governments that have larger data sets than we do.

“We really want to leverage that on what we call the big data security analytics platform and how we can analyse that data to help customers.”

Rohatgi said that Symantec’s approach to selling security had shifted over the years and that the hard sell or scare tactics that some vendors employed did not work.

“We are not in the business of selling IT anymore, we are in the business of delivering secure outcomes,” he said.

“Our approach is very consultative with the customer, we need to understand what are the key issues they are facing, and then trying to look at how best we can help them.

“When a customer discovers they have been breached, they will immediately approach us or another security vendor. We take a tact that asks what are the key issues they have been facing, relate that back to the trends we are seeing and then give recommendations based on that information.”

Rohatgi said to keep pace with the company’s growth strategy post split, it needs to recruit more partners.

“We are looking to recruit more partners, we are finding that we need to have a lot more partners in place for Symantec to really scale the business. Recruiting partners across APJ and particularly in Australia is a critical part of that,” he said.