Kaspersky Lab Americas partner conference

Kaspersky Lab hosted its third annual Americas partner conference in February in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.

The event drew close to 200 channel partners from across North America, including Canada, the U.S. and Latin America.

This year’s conference theme centered around collaboration, community and commitment.

by Maxine Cheung of Computer Dealer News

The Russian-based security vendor was founded in 1997 and made its way to the Americas market five years ago.

Eugene Kaspersky, the company’s founder and CEO, explained at the conference that the vendor’s current success results from the team spirit of the company and its partners.

Kaspersky’s chief operating officer, Eugene Buyakin, said the company is now present in 28 countries and is growing at a rate of 50,000 users per day.

Kaspersky executives admit they have very ambitious goals and aggressive plans for the vendor’s future.

Just last year, despite the down economy, Kaspersky achieved 30 per cent growth, year-over-year. In 2010, the vendor is aiming for a 35 per cent increase, year-over-year.

Steve Orenberg, president of Kaspersky Lab Americas, said this year, the company will make an investment in its people.

“We’ll continue to grow 25 per cent in our headcount for the Americas this year,” Orenberg said.

Kevin Krempulec, vice-president of sales for Kaspersky in Canada, said his objective this year is to really “get awareness out there with partners and customers.”

“In 2010, we’ll recruit more partners because there still are some holes to fill in terms of coverage,” Krempulec said. “We’ll also focus on enabling our partners to sell Kaspersky products.”

In addition to this, the company will also invest in field marketing this year to help further spread awareness and education in specific vertical markets.

Kaspersky used the conference to announce a number of new marketing initiatives that partners can take advantage of.

Randy Drawas, chief marketing officer for Kaspersky Lab Americas, spoke about the company’s security news service, ThreatPost.com.

This is a Web site that includes news stories and other related information for IT security and networking professionals and is led by two security journalists, Ryan Naraine and Dennis Fisher. Kaspersky channel partners also have the opportunity to promote themselves and events they host on the Web site.

The company also announced new super-leads, a product configurator, an online quoting tool, and a new Kaspersky Katalyst program.

Jeff Milcz, director of software services at Metafore IT Solutions, a London, Ont.-based solution provider and also a CDN Top 100 solution provider, said the new tools from Kaspersky are exciting.

“I love the idea of a quoting tool and the new product configurator because this will help us reduce the time and efforts of our sales organization,” Milcz said.

Adam Tanner, director of IT security at Oakville, Ont.-based Nexx Generation Security Solutions Inc. and the company’s president, Mike Kelly, were on hand at the event to accept the award for Canadian Partner of the Year from Kaspersky.

Regarding Kaspersky management support and accessibility, Tanner says there’s nothing there that he’d like to see changed.

“We’ve been a Kaspersky partner for two years and there’s nothing I can see that needs to be changed because upper management is fantastic and they respond quickly,” Tanner said.

For more coverage from the Kaspersky Americas partner conference, please visit this news article