Check Point driving partners into growth areas

Check Point has provided an update on the progress of its partner programme five months after it launched a number of enhancements.

The security player kicked off a revised programme in January, with a focus on introducing more secured margins for some deals, including competitive win-backs or high-value competitive accounts. There was also the introduction of an Elite tier to reward those taking a wide range of products to market.

Five months on and the world is in a different place due to the coronavirus, but the main themes of the Check Point partner programme have proved to be essential during the current situation, with the security player using the scheme to increase collaboration with resellers and partner profitability.

Michael Wakefield, head of enterprise and channel sales UK at Check Point Software Technologies, said it had wanted to reward loyalty and expertise, but also wanted to reach out to partners and engage them with the growth engines that were driving the business.

“We want to align our strategies with partner strategies,” he added. “The growth engines are accelerating and growing new customers and new technologies, including cloud and mobile.”

Wakefield said profitability had been increased through more margin opportunities, while the Elite tier had given resellers a chance to increase their differentiation.

One of the other hopes of the programme was that it would attract resellers in cloud and mobile that had not worked with the vendor before.

Wakefield said it had recruited 10 new partners in the first two months of the year. In 2019 as a whole, the vendor managed to onboard 25 partners.

“They have to have done a business plan with us, and the programme is done as a partnership, but those 10 have all come with an active pipeline,” he said.

The Covid-19 coronavirus has caused a surge in demand as users look to get securely connected in remote locations, so the vendor’s channel has been busy reacting to customer needs over the past couple of months.

Wakefield added that Check Point had also increased online support for the channel to allow people to keep active and trained up during the lockdown.

Andy Wright, regional director for Northern Europe at Check Point Software Technologies, said it was offering education around some of the technologies it could offer, such as cloud and perimeter, that resellers wanted to get genned up on.

He added that there had been strong demand around collaboration, security, and infrastructure and platform as a service, and those areas would be driving growth in the foreseeable future.

With remote working set to continue for the next few months, and possibly longer for some workers, Wright said there was a need to ensure that those people could be protected and it was an area its channel would need to keep focused on.

“Partners we currently work with are in a good position to leverage the relationships [they already have] in these accounts,” he added.

Wakefield said it was standing by partners during the crisis and it had collaborative relationships with many of them and “they know we are here”.