By Tabrez Khan
RSA is increasing its focus on the commercial segment comprising small and medium businesses. The company will recruit up to 20 new tier-2 partners across the country to enhance its presence in the SMB space over the next few months.
“We have decided to overhaul our strategy and have a clear demarcation between our enterprise and commercial businesses. Earlier, everything was clubbed together, but now we will have a separate focus on the SMB business,” said Amitabh Jacob, Channel Manager, India and Saarc, RSA.
RSA is planning to target a maximum of 5-6 commercial partners across each zone in the country. These partners would be primarily responsible for selling two of RSA’s product lines—two-factor authentication solutions and Envision. The company plans to support these partners with the required training and marketing input.
Post-onboarding, the tier-2 partners will have access to RSA’s PartnerCentral portal. The portal has replaced RSA’s Secure World channel program, and will be the central repository for all partner enablement activities.
According to Jacob, RSA decided to increase its focus on the commercial segment because the security needs of the SMB segment are finally maturing. “For a long time now SMBs have focused solely on perimeter-level security. But they are now moving to the second level of security, and the stress is on security of information rather than just endpoints. There is therefore a clear opportunity for both RSA and its tier-2 partners to address this space.”
RSA will continue to focus on the enterprise business while increasing its presence in the SMB segment. The company has partnerships with six national systems integrators who drive its enterprise business across key verticals such as telecom, BFSI, retail and IT-ITES. In the commercial segment, RSA plans to have a more regionalized strategy rather than a focus on specific verticals; the stress will be on coverage, said Jacob.
He said that RSA is also keen on utilizing the SaaS model to provide managed security services because customers are increasingly considering the use of SaaS for some of their security needs. “As the IT environment across organizations becomes increasingly virtualized, perimeters will be difficult to define. In such cases, perimeter security becomes ineffective, and RSA’s role will become important in securing the information assets of customers.”
On the partner enablement front, the company is planning a new training program which will have two tracks—an online sales and technical certification component and a classroom-based training component.
RSA has also opened a partner program office in Bengaluru for coordinating all partner enablement activities. |