Channel numbers continue to swell at SonicWall

Ever since SonicWall spun out of Dell and began the latest chapter of its life as an independent company the channel has supported the security vendor.

Last year saw the firm exceeding its own expectations on the channel front and that momentum has continued with the number of resellers growing.

Bill Conner, CEO of SonicWall, said that it now had 21,000 partners working with its Secure First partner programme and 8,000 of those were new to the vendor.

"As the deal [to become independent] was announced there was a big question about how much would the channels come back post Dell and how strong would the brand be? Across the world the brand is extremely strong and resilient. Net new partners says we are not doing what we were doing before," he said.

The amount of business that is going through the deal registration process is also up by 30-40% compared to where it used to be, indicating the health of the partner community.

He added that it had already taken market share thanks to the channel in all of the regions and markets it operated in globally.

One of the other moves made by the vendor that has appealed to partners has been the establishment of the SonicWall University and thousands of partners have gone through exams to increase their skills.

"The channel is 100% of my business and without it I don't have a business. We don't make money if they are not making money," he said.

Conner said that education around the latest threats remained a key task for the channel with SMEs vulnerable to a growing number of attacks.

SonicWall has also been ploughing dollars into R&D and using more machine learning tools to identify threats and Conner said that it was "firing on all cylinders" and gaining praise from some of the largest analyst houses for its product strategy.

For partners the key will be to become accredited and certified around the latest cyber security issues to make sure they can deal with real-time threats.

The SonicWall University provides training on the latest threats to make sure that the channel is up to speed with some of the problems that customers might be dealing with right now.

"The people we are fighting have weaponised tools and we have some of the best brains in the industry in this company reigniting our development and business to take security to the masses that have been under served and under protected at a decent price point," said Conner.