Antispam Software: Symantec
Other solution providers said they had no problem with either the profitability or performance of Symantec’s products. Cal McMurtry, security consultant for The Ergonomic Group in Garden City, N.Y., said Symantec’s antispam tools were enabling him to stop spam cold and make sure that all end points in customer organizations are up to federal regulations and code. “We have found the breadth of Symantec offerings to be right on,” he said. “Now it’s just a matter of selling them.”
The Presidential election of 2000 was a blowout compared to the fight for Channel Champion in the antispam technology category.
In eking out victory over competitors SurfControl and Trend Micro, Symantec swept all seven technical criteria, only to fall behind in all nine channel criteria. The three competitors were separated by just four-tenths of a point in the overall satisfaction rating.
On the technical side, Symantec scored a knockout punch, earning particularly high marks on the criteria of management features and scalability of its products.
When the Cupertino, Calif.-based vendor bought Bright-mail in May 2004 to shore up its antispam technology, Symantec CEO John Thompson and other officials predicted that the acquisition would thrust Symantec into the lead of the competitive antispam market. Earlier this year, the vendor released the 8100 and 8200 lines, two new families of antispam gateway appliances that incorporate the Brightmail technology.
“It’s great to be able to offer a turnkey solution,” said Randy Cochran, vice president of channels, Americas, at Symantec. “This is a lead horse that can get resellers in the door for additional sales.”
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While solution providers rallied around Symantec products, they showed less enthusiasm for the vendor’s channel programs, giving it lower marks than both of its rivals in sales margins, upselling opportunities and visibility in the channel. This put the company in third place, albeit by a slim margin, on channel criteria overall. In its biggest setback, Symantec fell behind SurfControl, the overall runner-up and leader in channel-program areas, by 3.9 points in the critically important area of sales margins.
Symantec’s push to make integrated appliances may be partly to blame, suggested David Sockol, CEO of Emagined Security, a solution provider in San Carlos, Calif.
“Don’t get me wrong, Symantec tools are fantastic,” he said. “But with these [appliances], [customers] are up and running in 30 minutes to an hour, so there’s really not much opportunity for us to bill them for implementation.”