Debasish Mukherjee, VP, Regional Sales APAC, SonicWall, highlights the channel directions for 2020
What have been the key highlights of 2019 and how will 2020 be an important year for the IT channel industry?
SonicWall a 100 per cent channel driven organisation held India Partner Summit in Abu Dhabi, late in 2019 to meet with its top performing channel partners who contribute over 90 per cent the company’s revenue, to chart the business goals for 2020. At the India Partner Summit, Channel Partners were recognised for their contribution to SonicWall’s growth in 2019. In that year, we registered exponential growth with our channel partners who have gone through training, certification and together, they have helped us revamp our partner program to support our single platform approach. We have a strong base in the SMB market and we made incredible strides in the enterprise market. For 2020, we will continue to focus on enterprise, improving our one of a kind offering, that will simplify deployment processes and unify security governance, compliance and risk management all from a single application.
2020 will be the year of growth. Our channel partner program is rapidly expanding, our investments in SonicWall are yielding more impressive outcomes than ever before, and our abilities and intelligence capabilities are getting smarter year after year. We are continuing to add capabilities to our SonicWall Capture Cloud Platform to make it best in class. 2020 will be a big year for SonicWall and our channel partners. We’re making significant investments in the company and this will specifically benefit our partners. Collaborating with our channel partners on business plans and charting out a roadmap together helps us achieve our growth target. We’re continuing to invest in:
- Sales and technical resources to help our partners find more opportunities
- Innovative products and technologies to continuously improve our offerings
- Channel enablement tools and content so our partners can stay up to date on the latest SonicWall innovations.
Can you tell us about the top three technology trends that the channel community should be betting on and why?
In the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, world economies are predicting a spike in cyber threats. SonicWall is dedicated to releasing the fastest and highest performing threat detection platform in our new Generation 7 firewalls. With over 70 per cent of today’s internet sessions being encrypted, 10 per cent of malware coming through encrypted channels, and 20 per cent of malware coming through non-standard ports, it is vital to have a firewall that can examine the data flowing through these ports without hurting the business’s productivity and budget.
Business will change and probably change for ever. When employees are working from home this creates different problems for organisations and IT, first security threats are far more then working from secured environment, which is from office and second biggest problem for IT is visibility and control.
In this situation, the partner’s role is critical, first learning the new ways of doing business, making their sales team ready to flow with the demand and educate customers about the right solutions and not stop gap arrangements, and the second most critical is making customers’ business available 24×7 by creating remote service desk.
What are the top channel directions your company has set for your partners and where should your partners invest to be aligned with these directions?
In 2020, SonicWall will increase its footprint and focus on the government sector in APAC countries. New product launches, efforts on selling the quick moving products and solutions and enhancing training capabilities will be the direction. When we see the larger picture, it is imperative that our common goals with business associates are in sync regarding financial and people investments. To this end, we encourage our partners’ employees to join SonicWall University certification courses and upskill themselves.
SonicWall University is a sophisticated online partner enablement platform designed to keep SecureFirst Partner Sales Representatives, Pre-Sales and Support Engineers at the forefront of today’s cyber security threats and solutions. The platform offers free training with pathways for partners to earn their SecureFirst Sales, Technical and Support Accreditations. SonicWall continues to address its partners’ employees training and skilling needs and draws up incentive schemes which factor in training and upgrading by the salespeople. As of now, over 1000 salespersons have been trained in the SonicWall University.
