Webroot putting the ground work in before 2020 programme launch

In the seven months since Webroot was acquired by Carbonite there has been plenty of activity taking place to get the channel in the right place.

The two firms are looking to roll out a unified partner programme next year and in the run up to that launch the firm’s channel head has been casting an eye overt the existing arrangements looking to take the positive forward into 2020.

Charlie Tomeo, vp, worldwide channel sales at Webroot, said that one of the reasons that Carbonite had chosen the firm was because of its strength in the channel and it wanted to build on that and make it easier for partners to do business with the firm.

Webroot has 16,000 channel partners worldwide, and Carbonite has between 4-5,000 partners and in the past few months Tomeo has been busy getting feedback from the channel and getting a clear idea of its key partnerships at distribution and reseller levels.

“We are going into 2020 making it easier for partners to do business with us as a whole with Carbonite,” he said.

He added that both companies were channel facing and it was about taking the best approaches to make sure that it could develop an offering that would appeal to both existing and fresh partners.

“We always look for more and are making sure that the partners we are dealing with are going to be the partners that are going to engage with us,” he added “We need to figure out what we don’t know to make sure that partners are getting the support they need.”

The MSP space is one that Webroot has identified as one area that is growing and the vendor will be looking to ensure the support is there for those partners, and for traditional VARs that are transitioning to that model, under the programme changes coming next year.

“We are really excited about 2020 from the standpoint of some of the things we are going to do in the channel” he said.

Tomeo said that one thing that had not changed since the acquisition was the people working with the channel and the Webroot channel organisation had remained together to continue to give consistency to partners.

He added that as well as looking to ramp up its channel activities in 2020 the security market was also showing no signs of slowing down and there continued to be plenty of opportunities out there for partners.

But he warned that customers needed to be given a clear understanding of the value of spending on more security and resellers should not simply take it for granted that a customer that needed more protection would sign a sales order.

“Partners are looking for help around how the develop, sell and market tools and solutions so that the customer understands why they need it. Customers need to understand that you are not just piling on [more products and services] but that you are adding value,” he said.