With Kaspersky Lab North America celebrating its tenth year of doing business on the continent it would seem like there is no better time to revamp the channel programs of the security software provider.
Kaspersky Lab North America is now giving partners the ability to achieve up to 50 percent margins and will be rewarded with additional incentives beyond that via a new Partner Loyalty Program that rewards the owners of value-added resellers (VARs) and managed service provider (MSP) partners for all sales on an ongoing basis.
“We want to reward both the salespeople and the owners of the solution providers for working with us,” said Jon Whitlock, senior director of channel marketing for Kaspersky Lab North America. “We also want to make it easier for both us and our partners to see how we’re doing together.
To that end, Kaspersky Lab North America will be working more closely with platinum and gold level partners to set and achieve business goals, Whitlock said.
The Kaspersky Lab North America channel program is also being aligned globally around the same tiered model, and the company has committed to providing partners with content and turnkey marketing campaigns that can be co-branded in a way that drives leads directly back to the solution provider versus the Kaspersky Lab North America marketing organization.
As attacks that are specifically focused on endpoints have increased in the last few years, Whitlock said commercial organizations are being a lot more demanding about the quality of the anti-malware software they put on those devices. Going forward, Whitlock noted that the explosion of mobile computing devices is not only increasing that demand, the rise of the Internet of things (IoT) will also increase the number of endpoints that need to be protected.
Winning that business, requires anti-malware software that not only protects the device, but can also encrypt all the data on that device in a way that is simple to manage, Whitlock said.
The challenge that many providers of anti-malware face is that in the lower end of the market there has been a proliferation of free anti-malware software. But those offerings typically are not as feature-rich or provide users with regular updates based on the discovery of new and emerging threats by security intelligence services, such as the one Kaspersky Lab North America provides.
There’s no doubt these days that the battle for share in the anti-malware software category is among the fiercest playing out across the channel. The ultimate winner of that battle will not only be the security software provider that makes selling this class of software the most profitable, but just as importantly the one that reduces the number of security incidents a solution provider actually has to incur the cost of servicing.
Michael Vizard has been covering IT issues in the enterprise for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWEEK, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review.