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."