After having rolled out its new look PartnerNet portal, Symantec is now focusing on offering customized training programs for its partners. Here the training is tailored around particular technologies rather than educating partners across all platforms and products. Interestingly this customization of the training courses is exclusive to the Indian region.

“Currently, the biggest issue that our partners are facing is related to competence. We don't want ourselves or our partners straddled with competence issues because they have not been trained in one particular platform,” elaborated Ajay Verma, Director-Channels and Alliances, Veritas Software Solutions (Symantec and Veritas Software Solution merged last year).

“We have soft-launched the BackUp Exec 11D, which is more like a plug and forget software with lot of autonomy built in” Darrell Riddle, Director-Product Management, Symantec Corporation

He added that Symantec is trying to educate those solution providers who might have 20 percent of the business of any other big systems integrator's turnover, but are poised on deploying innovative solutions. Symantec has migrated from working with those SP's who are into generic trading to working closely with those who have a well thought out strategy on emerging customer verticals. This is why it has trained over 300 partners on technologies the latter have chosen, in the JAS 2006 quarter.

As part of this customization training initiative, Symantec talks to its SP's and decides with them what stream of data management-backup, recovery, protection, compliance-they needed training on. An enablement program is then formulated for the SP's technical staff.

In the meantime, Symantec is spreading the good word about its BackUp Exec 11.D, which was launched on November 6, 2006 globally. As yet, the company has not launched the product in India in a big way. Instead it is educating its channel network about it.

The Backup Exec 11D is a Windows Servers software, developed primarily for small and medium-sized organizations, to offer continuous data protection beyond Microsoft Windows file servers and workstations to include Microsoft Exchange.

Symantec is focusing a lot on the SMB space, where awareness about data security and backup is still not very high. “The reason is pretty simple. Enterprises are well aware of the importance of data and have a strategy to protect it. They have IT departments with trained personnel to look after data management alone. But the SMB segment does not have such resources,” informed Darrell Riddle, Director-Product Management, Symantec Corporation.

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