Dell SonicWALL took a critical step on the road to its future as an independent business with the launch of a new partner program for the North American market.
Introduced at SonicWALL’s PEAK 16 user conference in Las Vegas and open to all SonicWALL resellers, the Reward for Value program seeks to help partners deepen their security expertise and widen their security service offerings by providing rich, web-based technical enablement and sales accreditation resources. Those resources will focus both on SonicWALL products and the security hazards those products are designed to block, including ransomware and advanced persistent threats.
SonicWALL will make those and other Reward for Value materials available to its channel via a forthcoming partner portal.
Program members will have access to unspecified “co-marketing opportunities” as well, along with a variety of financial incentives, including discounts for identifying leads, delivering proof of concepts, driving renewals, and extending the range of SonicWALL solutions used by their clients.
“Customers are facing a fast-paced world of ever changing security threats and mounting requirements for industry compliance,” said Steve Pataky, vice president of worldwide sales for Dell SonicWALL, in a press statement. “It’s imperative that we help our valued partners reinforce their roles as trusted advisors to their customers. A cornerstone of supporting our partners is our new partner program designed to enable partners to deepen and broaden their security practices.”
One SonicWALL partner likes what’s he heard about the Reward for Value program so far.
“It’s a very good step forward,” says Joshua Liberman, president of Net Sciences Inc., an IT services provider and SonicWALL partner in Albuquerque, N.M. According to Liberman, who is attending PEAK 16 this week, SonicWALL employees have privately stated that Reward for Value will offer deal protection that ensures partners receive financial compensation on registered deals if they’re subsequently underbid by a competitor. SonicWALL has also told Liberman that it plans to base program benefits partially on training completed and certifications earned in addition to sales volume.
“They’re going to actually pay attention to what your level of expertise is,” he says approvingly.
Today’s announcement comes just over two months after Round Rock, Texas-based Dell†announced the sale of its software group, which includes both SonicWALL and Quest Software, to private equity firm Francisco Partners and hedge fund Elliott Management. The new program offers the first concrete glimpse into SonicWALL’s plans for its partners after it’s no longer a Dell subsidiary.
That’s a day many of those partners are looking forward to, according to the results of a survey that SonicWALL conducted shortly before this week’s conference. Over 60 percent of the nearly 300 resellers the company polled described themselves as “very excited or excited about the future of Dell SonicWALL,” according to the company’s press release.
The new survey also revealed that 75 percent of SonicWALL partners have experienced higher sales of security solutions in the past year, and that network security and unified threat management were the top contributor to security revenue growth during that timeframe for 77 percent of resellers.
According to SonicWALL, a sell-out crowd of 744 partners is scheduled to attend PEAK 16, which runs through Wednesday.
