Symantec CEO’s pledge to smaller businesses, resellers

Symantec President and CEO, Enrique Salem, remains a firm supporter of SMBs, telling those who have questioned their strength: “I see a great opportunity in the SMB segment”. Speaking to the media on a recent visit to Sydney, Salem stressed the massive importance of the IT reseller channel, reiterating a pledge he made when he first became CEO. “When you look at the go-to-market strategy, we are always going to use partners to reach these (SMB) segments,” he said. “I made a commitment that said ‘as long as I am CEO, every year we will do more through partners than the previous year’. I absolutely believe that, because if you are trying to reach SMBs the only way to do it is through partners.”Another area of opportunity for resellers is Symantec’s recently-launched services offering, which will be involving resellers. “We were going to ask our partners to deliver the services – we’ll deliver the software and in the SMB and what we call enterprise segment (below 5000 users) we’re asking our partners to deliver services,” explained Salem. He adds: “We have a critical role to play as the world moves towards Software as a Service.”While he could not comment on future acquisitions likely to be made by the company, Salem also hinted at some of the things that we can expect Symantec to be focusing on in the future. He said that Symantec’s “centering point” is how to protect data. As such, the company will remain acquisitive in the area of security and, as demonstrated above, will also focus on Software as a Service.The company also has its eye on the mounds of unstructured data in businesses. Salem said: “You should expect that Symantec will introduce technologies that will allow you to understand ownership and access to unstructured data – that will be a key trend in the next couple of years.” Added to this, Symantec is working on digital rights management, data ownership and enterprise rights management.Salem concluded: “When you look at Symantec over the next 10 years, our goal, our purpose and our hope is to help our customers secure and manage their information from the large number of threats on the widest range of devices.”