Sunbelt Shines Light On Spyware


Company:

Headquarters: Clearwater, Fla.

Technology Sector: Security

Key Product: Vipre Enterprise

Year Founded: 1994

id
unit-1659132512259
type
Sponsored post

Number of Channel Partners: 1,900 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Small-business-focused solution provider

Why You Should Care: While many security software vendors sell kludgy antivirus/antispyware combinations that take up lots of disk and memory space, Sunbelt has developed its Vipre product from scratch as a comprehensive virus, spyware and malware protection system.

The Lowdown: There's no shortage of vendors with antivirus and antispyware software. But Sunbelt Software founder Stu Sjouwerman (pronounced "Showerman") says most of those vendors started out with antispam and antivirus software then "bolted on" antispyware through an acquisition or a separate product they developed.

That approach leads to ineffective "bloatware," Sjouwerman argues. "That's why we started

Sunbelt Vipre

with a blank slate to create our product," he said of Sunbelt's product development strategy. "It needs to be comprehensive. And spyware is the hard part of the business."

Sunbelt has been around for a while. It began as a VAR in the Digital Equipment Corp. VAX/VMS market before evolving into a software developer and expanding into antispyware about five years ago, giving a lot of solution providers a new reason to check the company out. The major selling point today for the company's Vipre Enterprise software is that administering security applications has become a major headache for businesses. And that's an opportunity for Sunbelt's resellers, who account for about 35 to 40 percent of the company's sales. "Channel partners love this product," Sjouwerman said.

Most new Sunbelt customers are dissatisfied defectors from competitors (Sjouwerman mentions Symantec in particular). "There isn't a new market here. This is a replacement market," he said. The company is even offering its software for a limited time to users of competing products for a price of $10 per seat (up to 500 seats).

Sunbelt wants to boost indirect sales over the next few years to account for 70 percent of its total revenue. "We cannot scale [product sales] going direct. We have to go through the channel and be partner-friendly," Sjouwerman said.

By "partner-friendly," Sjouwerman means putting a great deal of emphasis on support for both resellers and their customers, and avoiding channel conflict by providing compensation to Sunbelt's direct sales force for deals made through partners.

Lifeboat Distribution, owned by parent company Wayside Technology Group, has been distributing Sunbelt software for more than a year to its stable of resellers. "Customer feedback has told us that [Sunbelt] puts out quality products that meet or exceed their expectations," said Danielle Giordana, vendor relations manager at Shrewsbury, N.J.-based Wayside.

In a sign of the company's growing market presence, Sunbelt struck a deal in January with Zenith Infotech, which provides managed service infrastructure and business continuity services, to offer Vipre Enterprise as part of its Total Desktop Care solution for its managed service provider partners.

Sunbelt is particularly focusing on small businesses and the solution providers that sell to them. Sjouwerman said he's happy to leave the big, multinational corporations to competitors such as Symantec. "We'll take the other 8 million companies," he said.