Gary Bloom has the task of soothing VARs as Symantec creates a new channel program after the acquisition of Veritas, his ex-company. We spoke to him at last month’s partner conference in PhoenixCDN: What’s the channel strategy now that the two companies are officially together.
Gary Bloom: Over time we’ll merge the lanes as we understand more of the partners’ requirments, as we understand the unique challenges they’re facing bringing the products together. One of the key things we’re trying to do, and the reason we’re tying to be sensitive, is we do not want to dilute the businesses of our channel partners, we don’t want to dilute their effectiveness in selling the technologies. And to be clear we do not want people selling products that aren’t really qualified to provide the services and the knowledge surrounding those products. We want to make sure our channel partners are somewhat protected in what they sell and the customer is somewhat protected in who they’re buying from, that they’re buying from knowledgeable sources.
CDN: When will they be merged?
G.B: If it’s five years out and we’re still operating as independent companies that’ll be a problem.
CDN: Do you see the managed, hosted services that Symantec provides increasing?
G.B.: It’s a business we’re in, one we’ve been successful in and its delivering value to customers. So the question is, is software going to be delivered more and more as a service, I believe it will.
There’s going to be a continual push to hosted apps, managed services, software delivered as a service to access information and do things remotely. When it comes to how you service the customer that gets delivered and sold to the customer, I don’t completely undestand why people assume that’s channel unfriendly, because ultimately it still has to have a touchpoint with the customer, still has to be sold to the customer and the customer still has to be serviced.
CDN: Partners would argue they get a bigger percent of the cut if they’re delivering the managed service as opposed to the vendor.
G.B.: If they’re capable of delivering it, you’re correct. They might get a bigger revenue stream, (but) I would argue whether they would have more profitablity or more margin in that approach because it’s not an inexpensive proposition, or one that operates very effectively without large scale. The upfront investment to build out all that capability and infrastructure is enormous. I believe you’re talking about a limited number of partners that have the financial resources to meet that requirement. Otherwise everybody would be doing it.
CDN: So Symantec plans to increase that . . .
G.B.: I don’t think there’s a software company that won’t be forced to increase the quantity of their technology. That said, we’re an infrastructure provider, not an application provider. So do I believe that we’ll be able to give either directly or through our partners or in conjuction with our partners the ability to say ‘You can run it or we can run it, you can install it or we can manage it.’
CDN: What’s missing ?
G.B.: There’s all kinds of opportunity to either expand into adjacent markets or to continue to define what Symantec is long term through M&A . . . There’s plenty of opportunities where we could go. There’s network management, systems management, systems monitoring, every aspect of the infrastructure stack. In the infrastructure software market there’s something like 2,000 to 3,000 vendor delivered products and any one of those are potential additions to our strategy.
CDN: How would you describe your style?
GB: Reasonably aggressive.
CDN: What do you like to read?
GB: I’m a prolific reader on the Internet of what’s happening in my industry. I walked into a partner meeting the other day. There was 30 people there and I knew of an announcement that partner made that some of its people didn’t know.
CDN: What’s the worst mistake you ever made?
G.B.: I spend a lot of time internally agonizing over every mistake because I’m a perfectionist and I believe that to deliver optimal performance of a company you have to optimize every piece of the business.
(But) I came in (to Veritas) at the end of 2000, and the company was $1.2-billion. We sold the company at the end of 2004 after the four toughest years and it had $2.41 billion revenue, so it’s pretty difficult for me to focus on my regrets.