Snubbed By Symantec

Vendors that think their high-profile brand can carry the day in the SMB market despite technical gaffes, questionable reseller support and uncompetitive margins should heed the tale of solution provider Cooltronics' experience with security giant Symantec.

STEVEN BURKE Can be reached at (781) 839-1221 or via e-mail at sburke@cmp.com.

Tyler Dikman, president and CEO of the $3.5 million solution provider, said he had been a loyal Symantec reseller for several years when he and his team began having trouble last year with Symantec Norton AntiVirus license keys. The problem, Dikman said, was that about 10 percent of the time Cooltronics was coming up with invalid keys. That required his employees to get on a call for as much as 30 minutes to a general tech-support line in India, which would direct them to mail a copy of the license to Symantec and get a new key, Dikman said. He tried to get the issue resolved but was told that he could not get priority support or a dedicated account rep because his sales volume wasn't high enough. (Cooltronics had accounted for an estimated 700 licenses over the years.) Meanwhile, Symantec was approaching Cooltronics' customers directly for license renewals, he said.

A frustrated Dikman raised the issue with a Symantec channel rep at an event last summer, saying he would move all his Symantec business to security up-and-comer Secure Resolutions, which was courting him. Dikman said the Symantec rep noted that given his size, he would not get a dedicated account rep. Dikman promptly began moving his business and said since moving to the bulletproof Secure Resolutions product, he has doubled his profits on every license sale and received priority technical support.

Symantec said Cooltronics was never a part of its formal partner program and thus never received the benefit of product-specific training or specialized support. Dikman said that is laughable, since he had been buying Symantec licenses from distribution giant Ingram Micro for several years. Symantec, furthermore, said it has committed $4 million to SMB partner tools and training and an additional $9 million toward infrastructure for such partners.

Dikman said the lesson to be learned by big vendors is to act more like channel-hungry small vendors. "Secure Resolutions knows it's successful because of VARs like me. Putting out a quality product is not enough. You have to provide the support and competitive margin to go with it," he said.

HAVE YOU BEEN SNUBBED BY SYMANTEC?
SEND YOUR EXPERIENCES TO SBURKE@CMP.COM.