SonicWALL's Auger: Channel Strategy to Foster Growth

DELL SECURITY PEAK 16 — The second day of Peak 16 kicked off Tuesday with SonicWALL partners being prepped on the company’s Americas channel strategy.

In June, Dell announced it was selling its software division, including Quest Software and its SonicWALL security business. At the end of the third quarter, SonicWALL will be a private, independent company with a new Secure First Partner Program.

Chris Auger (pictured on stage, above), executive director of North America network security, said SonicWALL’s channel strategy is all about gaining market share and growing faster than the market as a whole.

“Everything we do is to help you grow, grow profitably and do it efficiently,” he said. “The key is providing feedback.”

Auger also said SonicWALL’s goal is to be “maniacally focused on being the organization most easy to do business with.”{ad}

“You’re going to have to hire and train more people to make that (growth) happen,” he said. “It’s about solution completeness, how do you expand your portfolio, how do we help you run your organization more efficiently, and last, revenue comes from having for sale what’s wanted, while profitability is from differentiation.”

Adding capabilities will gain more customers, Auger said. Examples include securing email, as well as securing the connectivity that businesses are adding to attract top-tier workers who want to work from any device, anywhere, he said.

“This is where it really turns into a solution, expanding from simple firewall security to providing an overall connected solution,” he said.

Security as a service provides an easy way for partners to become an MSP in a straightforward way, Auger said. SonicWALL executives said the new partner program will include a renewed emphasis on supporting MSPs.

Stephanie Mims, Dell SonicWALL’s executive director of customer success, said a big part of SonicWALL and the new partner program will be “improving the experience for customers” and increasing quality control. New training programs will be focused on these areas, she said.

“We look forward to growing our service capability and for you to grow your service capability,” she said.

Nitor, a health-care IT company, has been a SonicWALL partner for five years. Dave Svenson, president, said the new partner program will help increase sales.

“Marketing funds will be easier to attain,” he said. “Setting up events and things of that nature are much easier. Because of the dynamic of such a bigger business before, with multiple events happening in the same territory, it was difficult to schedule certain things. And the bigger piece of it is more incentives for our sales teams to directly go after SonicWALL. This just incents our sales organization to push more of that product line.”