Symantec and partners building $1 billion hosted services business

LAS VEGAS – With its acquisition of Message Labs 18 months ago, Symantec Corp. (NYSE: SYMC) is making a more aggressive push into the hosted services space this year.

According to Randy Cochran, vice-president of North American channel sales at Symantec, more customers are “asking to move to a subscription-based model” when it comes to services.

“Hosted services is one pillar of our cloud strategy,” Cochran said. “This is really an extension of how we’re bringing our solutions to market. Most customers will look at the cloud and will only move certain parts of their organization or certain aspects of IT instead of moving it all. So how does a partner participate in this? They need to be able to offer both (private and public clouds) because customers will have both.”

Mark Bregman executive vice-president and chief technology officer at Symantec, said the addition of hosted security services at Symantec is an evolution in the company’s go-to-market strategy to provide customers with alternative means of procuring and installing software and services.

In testament to its investment in this area, Rowan Trollope, formerly the senior vice-president of consumer products at Symantec, has now stepped into the role of senior vice-president, Symantec Hosted Services. Trollope has only been in this position for three weeks and will move to the United Kingdom, where Symantec’s Hosted Services unit is based, to oversee and grow this part of the business.

“We’re taking Symantec technologies and are integrating them into Message Lab’s technology stack to create the best in protection services,” Trollope said.

In terms of market opportunities, Trollope said there are plenty in the enterprise space that partners can take advantage of.

”Our roadmap (for hosted services) is very aggressive,” he explained. “We’re looking at the next most obvious candidates that we can deliver through our SaaS (software-as-a-service model). We also see this as a time where we can flesh out our DLP (data loss prevention) offerings, which make a lot of sense to do in the cloud.”

Enrique Salem, CEO and president at Symantec, said so far, the company’s hosted services business is “doing very well” and he expects the company to do US$1 billion in this area of business in the next five years.

In order for the channel community to be prepared for this delivery model, Cochran suggested partners move towards a specialized model where they make investments in certain technologies.

“Partners need to be specialized and have expertise in order to be able to sell, develop and support these services for customers,” Cochran said.

In addition to becoming specialized, Michael Murphy vice-president and general manager of Symantec Canada, said the types of opportunities that hosted services bring to partners is tremendous.

“Whether they want to offer licensing or hosting, partners can offer this to their customers,” Murphy said. “It’s a great way for partners to enhance their services offering and also it’s a good opportunity for partners who don’t have a service offering to develop a practice around it.”

Like other vendors, Symantec realizes that the migration path towards the cloud is not something that will happen overnight for businesses.

Both Murphy and Cochran agree that at the end of the day, this model comes down to trust between the end-user and partner.

“Customers should ask good questions and ask for case studies and ask what sorts of SLAs (service level agreements) the partners have,” Murphy said. “On the partner side, our partners already have relationships in many of these spaces so they need to convince their customers that we’re the trusted provider of the infrastructure.”

Cochran added that until customers really gain an understanding of how the technology and delivery model works, it’ll be a case of walk-before-you-run with many customers.

“Maybe partners can look at the less strategic stuff first (in a business) and test out this model with it,” he said. “Partners need to realize though that this is going to happen and it’ll be more of a hybrid (hosted) model.”

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Jim Love, Chief Content Officer, IT World Canada

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Maxine Cheung
Maxine Cheung
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