In a shift away from selling point-product solutions towards selling suite-based ones, Symantec Corp. (NASDAQ: SYMC) today announced new Protection Suites and its new Endpoint Protection Suite for small businesses as part of its suite-based go-to-market approach.
The new software solutions will be available sometime early next month said Joan Fazio, director of security product marketing at Symantec. The company, she added, is labeling the new solutions as Protection Suites because they not only provide security, but backup and recovery capabilities too.
“We’ve created a layered approach for protection and recovery around the endpoint and messaging environments for laptop and desktop PCs,” she said. “The intent with these solutions is to give great value because customers are buying this as a suite from one vendor. For partners, they can up-sell these suites to their customers and they can also attach services too.”
The Symantec Protection Suite Small Business Edition is designed for organizations between 10 and 99 employees, Fazio said, and includes endpoint security, messaging security, including support for Microsoft Exchange, and new Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Desktop Edition capabilities. Fazio said the intent is to help small businesses get up and running so they can “quickly get back to work.”
“Our estimate is you can install and deploy Endpoint Protection Small Business Edition to 15 individual endpoints in less than 20 minutes,” she said. “We want it to be sort of a set and forget-type solution.”
Depending on the number of nodes, the MSRP for net new licenses (per node) of the Small Business Edition starts at $44.99 for up to 24 nodes, and comes down to $35.70 for 50-99 nodes. To help attract new businesses, Fazio said Symantec also has what it calls a competitive upgrade, which is a discounted price for prospective non-Symantec customers. If a non-Symantec customer is already using a software solution from another vendor, they can purchase Symantec Small Business Edition through a competitive upgrade. Prices for this edition start at $20.75 for up to 24 nodes and goes down to $16.47 for 50-99 nodes.
For the mid-market, enterprise and large enterprise markets, with more than 100 employees, Symantec has its Protection Suite Enterprise Edition available. This includes endpoint security, messaging security and backup and recovery.
Symantec also announced that it has acquired Sunnyvale, Calif.-based secure Web gateway appliances vendor Mi5 Networks. Fazio said it’s Symantec’s intent to eventually integrate some of the Mi5 solution functionalities into its new Protection Suites later this year. She could not give a more specific date about these plans.
“We’re in the midst of enabling our partners now so partners know about this,” Fazio said. “The message to our partners is as (they’re) performing renewals from anti-virus to endpoint protection, lead with Symantec Protection Suites because there’s a huge (market) opportunity there and it’s also a sticky sale so partners can continue to get revenue.”
