RSA To Revamp Partner Program

RSA announced the changes Tuesday to the SecurWorld Program at the organization's North American Partner Council in Boca Raton, Fla. The revised program launches in January.

Over the last several years, EMC has expanded RSA's product portfolio in the areas of security management and compliance and authentication and identity protection through acquisition. Companies bought and folded into RSA include NetWitness, Tablus and Archer.

Despite the growing portfolio, RSA did not offer a well-defined program to help partners sell and service product categories. Instead, products were primarily sold individually. "We didn't have a very clear framework or curriculum," Joe Gabriel, director of global channels and alliances, said.

As of next year, that will change with the introduction of RSA SecurWorld Specialties. Partners will have the option of accreditation and training in either one of two core tracks: security management and authentication and identity. Partners also have the option of training in both.

Sales staff will be trained on product bundles to grab a bigger slice of customers' security budgets, while engineers can be trained as specialists in products, giving resellers the talent to sell services as well, Gabriel said. "It's going to depend on how far they go, but a partner has the ability to double what they're earning today."

RSA partners have been asking for this type of product consolidation for some time, Gabriel said. "The changes are really the result of feedback we've gotten from partners across the globe."

RSA also introduced at the Partner Council enhancements to its Data Loss Prevention Suite, which is part of RSA's security management and compliance portfolio. DLP Suite's ability to apply corporate policy to data moving outside the network has been expanded to include smartphones and tablets, social networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, and virtual desktops and their applications running on virtual machines from Citrix Systems or VMware. Before the upgrade to version 9.0, DLP Suite's capabilities were limited to ensuring compliance to e-mail, web mail, PC to USB drives and PC to printers.

The new features that encompass virtual desktops are targeted at the financial services and high-tech industries, health-care insurers and the biotech and life sciences. "We see a huge trend in terms of more and more companies adopting these new technologies," Ash Devata, senior manager of DLP products, said.

The DLP Suite 9.0 starts at $50,000, with licensing based on the number of users.

EMC over the years has gone from billing itself as a storage company to a supplier of data life-cycle management systems. The latter means selling hardware and software that manages corporate data from its creation to when it's discarded. As of March, RSA had a total of 750 North American partners, with 150 added over the last 12 months.