Toronto – Paul Comessotti, country manager for CheckPoint Canada, is telling solution providers that his company provides “PURE” security.
The company, headquartered out of Tel Aviv, Israel and Redwood City, Calif., bases its PURE offering on four company commitments: protected, unified, reliable and extensible.
The PURE offering intends to protect infrastructure and data against all threats, infiltration and loss. The unified portion is for manageability and scalability. Reliable centres on productivity and continuity, while extensible intends to handle the threats of today and tomorrow.
Within CheckPoint’s PURE Security play, the company wants to reduce complexity, increase scalability, protect all layers of the network and give customers some flexibility with emerging threats, Comessotti said.
“(PURE) can be updated on the fly without wholesale changes to the infrastructure,” he said.
CheckPoint traditional business has been providing perimeter firewalls with VPNs. It also offers Smart Defense services. New to CheckPoint is its security appliance through the NFR acquisition.
But, CheckPoint has only 13 employees in Canada and Comessotti said this necessitates a 100 per cent channel friendly mandate.
We have 13 people and we are highly leveraged. Those people are focused on generating customer demand and to support organizations that assist us,” he said.
With the channel, CheckPoint is able to play in many market segments such as government and private industry, Comessotti added.
The Canadian operation has 44 channel partners in Canada. They are all managed under the CheckPoint Valued Partner Program, which has five tiers: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Distributor.
The distributor layer is for broadline and specialty logistics suppliers such as Ingram Micro, Tech Data, Westcon and Avnet. Comessotti said that the distributors bring new solution providers to CheckPoint. Comessotti intends to grow CheckPoint Canada’s reseller network significantly in 2008. He would not say by how much.
“We do not see it slowing down. We do not do well when a VAR drops the box off and goes away. We need VARs to offer professional services. Those platinum partners have demonstrated an expertise along with offering professional services,” Comessotti, a former reseller himself, said.
“There is no finder’s fee for our channel partners. It is not how we operate. We are focused on delivering through the channel,” he said.Comessotti said that maintenance fees will not be taken direct after two years. Average margins are around 20 per cent, but Comessotti has seen channel partners earn more by offering training and support.
CheckPoint’s channel network is made up of boutique security partners and larger IT integrators.
”We are pure security. We do not focus on other areas and we do not want to go into other areas,” Comessotti said.