New Symantec CEO Enrique Salem Reaches Out to Partners

The John Thompson era is over at Symantec, and new CEO Enrique Salem (pictured) is striving to give channel partners peace of mind as Symantec marches forward. With that goal in mind, Salem has dispatched a letter to partners. The letter contains trusted IT advisor jargon — verbiage The VAR Guy typically avoids. But, let’s give Salem credit here. He is wise to show some love to Symantec’s channel. Take a look.

Sure, Salem took some heat for mid-2008 comments involving the channel and Wall Street. But that seems like a lifetime ago. Salem received upbeat feedback during the company’s Symantec Partner Engage event in October 2008. And now, he’s calling all the shots as Symantec’s CEO.

In addition to pointing out Symantec’s continued reliance on partners, the letter reinforces Salem’s 16-year tenure at Symantec. Translation: Symantec wants to position Salem as a new leader who also has inside experience across Symantec. Here’s the complete letter from Salem to Symantec’s channel.

Dear Partners,

I’m energized by my new role as Symantec’s Chief Executive Officer and the opportunities that we have to be successful together.  Symantec’s partners are our most vital sales channel and we’re committed to helping you continue to increase your revenue, grow your business and stay relevant with your customers.

Today’s business environment is very different than anything I’ve seen over the course of my 16 years with Symantec.  But even during these challenging times, customers still have critical information that needs to be secured and with the amount of information doubling every two year, so are their storage needs.  Together, we need to focus on providing solutions that help our customers reduce costs and minimize risk and deliver a near-term return on investment.

Information is what matters most to our customers and from a technology perspective, our first priority is investing more in security—helping our customers protect their critical information.  We will focus on delivering enhancements to our market-leading data loss prevention, endpoint protection and compliance solutions.  You’ll also see us working to bring our products together into integrated security suites that deliver more comprehensive protection.

We will also focus more on delivering next-generation backup and recovery solutions and we’ll continue to develop new technologies to simplify complexity for our customers.  You should look for continued innovations from us in the areas of data deduplication, continuous data protection and virtualization support.

We want to be your most strategic vendor partner.  We want to help you continue to be your customer’s most trusted IT advisor.  That means we’ll continue to innovate when it comes to products and services and we’ll provide you with programs and incentives that not only increase your bottom line, but open up new business opportunities for you.  Symantec will also take the steps necessary to drive tighter alignment in the field and reduce channel conflict.

You are critical to our success.  As CEO, my focus will be on delivering on commitments to you and keeping the communications lines open.  We want to know what you’re thinking and we’ll keep you updated on our progress and priorities.

Working together to help a customer solve a complex problem, saving them money, building a strong relationship—that’s success, that’s winning.  Together, we can do great things.

Enrique

Again, the letter was a smart move by Salem and/or the Symantec insider who pulled it together.The VAR Guy is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to his newsletter, RSS feed, Twitter feed , Webcasts and Resource Center.