Security vendor gets into managed services

Cancun, Mexico – Internet security vendor Kaspersky Lab is getting into the managed services space, the company announced at its annual partner conference, and are readying a solution for release in the second quarter of this year.

The managed services solution will be called Service Provider Edition and is currently being piloted in Calgary by IT consulting firm ES Williams.

Andrew Leung, vice president of ES Williams, said that customer value with this solution will be boiled down to the low monthly cost and the flexibility to add and subtract licenses. “There is no capital outlay or infrastructure cost for clients to acquire this end point security solution. It’s a low cost point of entry for customers and we have been able to manage it on our network, which will help them be protected better,” he said.

<a href="http://www.itbusiness.ca/IT/client/en/home/News.asp?id=55853Kevin Krempulac, the Canadian chief for Kaspersky told CDN that the channel plan for its managed services solution will be to address the current Kaspersky partners and push them to go after new customers while addressing existing customers.

Gary Abad, vice president of North American channel sales for Kaspersky, said the reason for initially targeting channel partners who have an established managed services practice is that they would have the security expertise to rollout the solution immediately. “For the end user this is a great service and for partners it will try to do all things such as scale to smaller customers and get deeper with others,” he said.

Since the managed services solution is still in pilot, Abad was unable to provide re-occurring revenue stream potential or margin opportunities. He did say that services revenue would be high if the solution provider offering hosting services or if they chose to go through a third partner supply such as Rackspace or Amazon Web Services. “We are still putting pencil to paper on that to see what the return is for partners and we want to provide that as well as infrastructure costs and training costs. Folks who have managed services we want to go to them first and build with them. As we do this slow rollout we’ll see what the results are,” he said.

Abad added that in phase two of the managed services rollout Kaspersky will at that point look to partner with either compete partners or those resellers who are putting the finishing touches on their managed services practice.

Kaspersky did not release too many details about the managed services offering.

One thing Kaspersky will not do with its managed services play is try to recreate another Rackspace or Amazon Web Services. Abad said that the managed services play will feature solutions for malware, anti-virus and encryption.

Abad believes that the sweet spot for Kaspersky managed services will be in the SMB. He said that sees 45 to 60 per cent growth in the SMB this year. “There is no doubt about it the SMB is are sweet spot and we shall continue to focus on that market and try to grab marketshare and this product is a natural fit.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Paolo Del Nibletto
Paolo Del Nibletto
Former editor of Computer Dealer News, covering Canada's IT channel community.

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