Interview: AVG Technologies VP of Global Channel Francois Daumard Talks Strategy

It’s been just over 7 months since Francois Daumard joined AVG Technologies as VP of Global Channel Sales for the security giant and Managed Workplace (from the Level Platforms acquisition) remote monitoring and management provider.

We reached out to him back when he took the job in December 2014 after leaving IBM’s Fiberlink. And we finally caught up with this former Apple and Microsoft executive in person at CompTIA’s ChannelCon event last week. It was worth the wait.

Daumard has faced an interesting challenge at AVG. The company is a giant in the consumer IT security business for antivirus software. It’s a household name with hundreds of millions users total.

“Statistically one out of five PCs is running AVG,” Daumard told MSPmentor. “That’s great in terms of brand recognition. For the channel it can be a problem.”

Channel partners may view AVG as free software.

“To clean up this potential confusion, we launched AVG Business.”

The brand was launched in the spring to target business projects for business to business. AVG Business goes exclusively through the channel.

AVG Business focuses in two main areas, Daumard said.

That’s not news. And both are crowded areas, Daumard acknowledged. AVG’s path to differentiation lies with leveraging each of the product lines (AV and RMM) for the other. To further that goal, AVG has ensured that each partner has a single account manager for all of the AVG Business portfolio.

“I don’t know of any other security company that has an RMM. And I don’t know of any other RMM that has security. If, on top of that we provide the best channel experience, we have an interesting package for channel partners.” 

The company is also open to commercial and technical partnerships, and recently announced just such a deal with Infrascale to add that backup and disaster recovery offering to its own portfolio. AVG has another deal with Centrify to create a secured single sign in solution.

Daumard said that AVG has 10,000 partners worldwide, but the company does not provide a breakout of how many of those customers are antivirus/security versus Managed Workplace versus both.

AVG has also accelerated the pace of releases of Managed Workplace. The current version is 9.1, and the next version, 9.2 is slated to increase functionality for the Mac and will be released later this month.

We look forward to seeing that and the execution of Daumard’s plans for AVG Business and channel.