RSA Adds Products To Services Certification Program

Netwitness, a network security monitoring system, and Archer, a platform for managing governance, risk and compliance, have been added to the company's Authorized Services Network, Joe Gabriel, director of worldwide channel marketing for EMC-owned RSA, said Tuesday. Before the addition, ASN only covered RSA's enVision and Data Loss Prevention Suite.

In an interview at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, Gabriel said Netwitness provides the bigger opportunity for post-sales revenue. The certification program provides training in forensic analysis with Netwitness, which gathers and stores event data from a network. Such data is used to track attacks.

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"Getting trained and getting that skill set to become that network forensic analyst is huge for a partner," Garbriel said. "That's the service they can add."

Archer is targeted at channel partners with a different practice than those selling Netwitness. While the latter is a security product, Archer is aimed at helping an organization set and manage policies throughout the IT network.

"It's a different type of a skillset from a traditional security reseller partner," Gabriel said. "Having a GRC practice is very different than having a security practice and obviously very different from having a network forensic practice."

RSA partners with GRC practices include FishNet Security and Accuvant.

In January, RSA launched a revised SecurWorld partner-training program that divided the company's channel products into two categories: authentication and identity and security management. To encourage certification, the company offered approved partners as much as double the deal registration margin on some products. In addition, RSA stopped requiring partners to get certified in the entire product portfolio and allowed them to specialize in one category or the other

"With the changes that we made in the program, we have the training available and we have a rich set of incentives and rewards for partners that invest in RSA," Gabriel said.

In other RSA news, the company released Monday an upgrade of Netwitness that included enhancements to the software's central management console and increased the amount of intelligence data within the system.