To bolster support of the channel and increase the value of its security
products, CA announced Sept. 3 a couple of big perks for its security channel
partners and end users. Starting yesterday, CA's Internet Security Business
Unit will give away remote installation of all its security products bought
through the channel. In addition, the company will throw in CA HIPS (Host-Based
Intrusion Prevention) for free to all customers who buy CA Threat Manager
through channel partners.
The overall objective is to ensure that we build more value for the partners
with their customers," says George Kafkarkou, senior vice president and
general manager of the ISBU. "In this competitive marketplace of
anti-malware products or threat management products, we're enabling our
partners to sell more at no incremental cost to them."
Some of CA's channel partners see this move as one of several made to
reassure the channel of CA's commitment to its security line, which many
believe has languished for years.
"I will be really honest with you, one of the challenges we have had is
selling renewals for a product that hasn't done anything over three years,"
says Brian Adams, technical architect for Planet Ed Technologies, based in Bloomington,
Ill. Adams explains that his customers have
felt the product lacked enough new features compared with the competition in
the last several years.
"They were doing really well for a long time and
then the product kind of atrophied for a while. The fact that they're doing
this now, I think it kind of states that they're taking the market seriously.
I've heard they're coming out with a whole new version of the product [in the] next
spring time frame, maybe even late winter, and they're trying to get back into
the game."
According to Todd O'Bert, president of Minneapolis-based Productive, this
latest program is not necessarily a surprise. He says he believes CA has been zooming
in its focus on security since it reorganized and formed the ISBU in 2008.
"I would say that they've been 'recommitting' for the last 12 to18
months since they created the ISBU," O'Bert says. "I mean, they
created this separate business unit and they redid all of the SDKs [software
development kits] and have rebuilt these products from the ground up. This is
just another kind of step in the process."
Both Adams and O'Bert agree that the two new programs will help them greatly
in selling CA security products into new and existing customer organizations.
The free remote installation will be especially useful in shortening sales
cycles, Adams says.
"It makes our turn on the sale shorter because we have to put less
effort into the sale, which is nice," he says. "We also have ...
[far] fewer headaches as far as guaranteeing the installation. If the vendor
does it themselves then there is less on our plate later if there's a
problem."
And the free HIPS add-on gives the channel more of an opportunity to ease
longtime anti-malware-only customers into a more layered security approach,
O'Bert says.
"It's a way to seed more demand in the marketplace and expand the
footprint within organizations," he says. "With HIPS you can put it in
passive mode and start monitoring to get familiar with it. It will be good to
get it in their environments and get them to just start looking at new stuff
from an observational mode."
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