LAS VEGAS – Symantec has long been known as a purveyor of boxed software, but it took advantage of its annual user conference, Symantec Vision, to elaborate on its storage as a service initiative aimed at the mid-market.
The first offering in the Symantec Protection Network, first announced in April, is Online Backup Service, a Web-based backup and restore service for small and medium-sized businesses that is currently in limited beta.
It was built in conjunction with channel partners, said Chris Schin, director of product management for Symantec’s Managed and Online Services, and partners helped determine the features and functions. Partners will be able to offer the backup as a co-branded managed service to their customers, and even perform backups and restores on their behalf with appropriate authorization.
“We’re going to the channel first,” Schin said. “If we get the right partners, we can get a hundred customers at once.”
Charges will be based on the amount of data that’s backed up, and the length of time customers want the data retained. They will opt in to a service plan based on an estimate of their backup volume, paying a monthly fee. Overages will be charged per gigabyte.Actual prices have not yet been set.
“The managed services environment is growing,” said David MacDonald, president and CEO of Toronto-based SoftChoice Corporation. “A lot of smaller resellers are offering them now.” SoftChoice, he said, is evaluating the idea of adding managed services and monitoring customer environments to its current business of providing hardware and software, either by acquiring the technology or developing it in-house. “We do see ourselves in managed services in the next couple of years,” he said.
Michael Murphy, vice president and general manager of Symantec Canada, said that, with the recent high profile data loss situations raising awareness of the risks of unprotected files, it’s important for companies like SoftChoice to help companies who don’t have the necessary skills to protect their data.
“The merger of Symantec and Veritas created a lot of opportunities for SoftChoice,” MacDonald noted. “Availability and recovery became more adopted in the midmarket space. Veritas was a very Unix-focused channel strategy. Symantec has put a more powerful channel strategy in place.”
“SoftChoice has begun an initiative to grow both security and storage spaces,” he went on. “We work a lot with partners, but do assessment work up front and make technical recommendations. Then we work with local VARs on the implementation.”
“The fastest growth opportunity is in the mid-market,” Murphy added. “Most larger companies have already settled on management products. We are resource constrained. The channel really helps there.”To help the channel, said Julie Parrish, vice president Global Channel at Symantec, the company is working on programs to give partners domain expertise with Symantec products. “We’re offering partners a choice: sell a box or do it themselves,” she said. “We believe that the ability to sell storage as a service is a particular business model that the reseller either has or has not. We’re looking for partners with the right capabilities.”
