“We’re looking for partners to go deep with specializations and, in turn, we’ll provide a strong return on investment to them,” Cochran said. “There’s no longer any revenue requirement to maintain your status in the program.”
Right now, Symantec’s Partner Program is comprised of four levels: Registered, Silver, Gold and Platinum. In order to qualify for a specific level, partners must meet a revenue requirement and hold certain accreditations. While these levels will stay the same, partners will have 10 months to achieve a certain number of specializations which will determine which level they’re in.
Specialized partners will be rewarded for their efforts through various benefits such as online training, increased discounts, licenses for internal use and teaming agreements.
“Specializations are key to myself and my team and we’ll see how we can map our specializations with Symantec and our relationships with other vendors to take advantage of economies of scale,” Brodkin said. “Specializations will help us gain that stickiness and extra value with customers and the margins will come after that.”
“At Symantec, we want to take a user-centric view of the world,” he said. “We don’t want to focus on point products. Instead, we need a new approach. We think everything revolves around people and information, with IT falling in the middle. As we go forward, let’s look at creating attributes such as where a person works, what role they have in the business and how long they’ve been with the company to create and enforce policies.”
Salem also outlined five enablers that he said will help guide Symantec’s business forward: device security, information protection, context and relevance and cloud enablement.
In an effort to encourage more partner-to-partner collaboration, Patterson said for a limited time, Symantec will have a financial incentive offering available to the channel. If a partner finds a customer opportunity and they’re not specialized in that particular area, they can register the deal and can find another partner who’s specialized to deliver those services. This way both partners can make margins and it allows for a stickier customer and partner relationship, Patterson explained. This financial offering is now available for partners and will be piloted over the next several months.
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American comedian Jake Johannsen was the MC of this year’s event, which attracted more than 350 channel partners and more than 100 Symantec employees.
Symantec executives used the conference to announce the formal launch of the company’s enhanced partner program, which now includes new specializations and a new Master Specialization category. The changes are part of Symantec’s transition towards a partner-led services delivery model, which the company first announced in April.