Blue Coat Enhances Partner Program

Blue Coat Systems Inc. has made enhancements to its Blue Coat Channel Advantage Program to better support partner profitability, market awareness, ease of selling, and investment in the WAN optimization and Secure Web Gateway markets. This announcement comes on the heels of another from Blue Coat, which recently released its Technology Integration Partners Program for interoperability testing.

Blue Coat’s VARs, system integrators and distributors secure Web communications and accelerate business applications across the distributed enterprise via a family of appliances and client-based solutions.

The program enhancements include:

— Evaluation product program: The BlueBox Evaluation Program assists solution providers in supporting pre-sales product evaluations for prospective Blue Coat customer opportunities, as well as recreating specific customer environments to test proof-of-concept designs. Evaluation equipment is available at a discount to approved solution providers under this program, and can be sold after installation at customer sites.

— Support provider program: The BlueTouch Support Partner Program allows Blue Coat-certified organizations to market, sell and deliver their branded service offerings backed by Blue Coat support. BlueTouch Certified Partners provide first- and second-line technical support to the end customer, and receive incremental price reductions and rebates on Blue Coat services.

— Discounting and deal registration improvements: To boost channel partner competitiveness, Blue Coat has changed its partner pricing to provide balanced discounts that facilitate global deployments. In addition, Blue Coat will offer the benefits of deal registration to all partners, regardless of level.

— Sales and marketing tools and support: Blue Coat is initiating a Virtual Marketing Agency, which will provide partners with marketing support for implementing partner-branded Blue Coat campaigns. Blue Coat also will provide select tools in localized languages to better serve solution providers in Blue Coat’s top geographies.

— Sales engineer training and certification: Blue Coat is introducing a new course specifically designed for channel sales engineers to better assist in pre-sales and post-sales deployments. The course will be offered at Blue Coat headquarters, Blue Coat Authorized Training Center locations around the world, as well as via regional Partner Academies starting early summer.