Cyberoam launches Partner Club to drive Channel Business :By - Digvijaysinh Chudasama, Vice-President – Sales, Cyberoam–– India

It is, after all, a business through the channel partners. So, why the partners should not be given more focus! Cyberoam is behind launching the Cyberoam Partner Club. Perhaps unique in the security market, Cyberoam Partner Club embraces all the partners, including Regional Distributors, Resellers, Reseller Sales Teams and Systems Integrator partners and stands as a gateway to recognize and reward these partners for their incessant efforts for putting up a good show for the entire year. This is also an entry point for the Cyberoam Champ Awards for the year 2008.

From the partners’ perspective, they are now assured of some recognition, incentives, rewards, etc., which act as an energizer for them to perform better and better.

“I heartily welcome Cyberoam’s new partner initiative which proves that Cyberoam cares about its channel partners and their growth,” says Harish Tyagi of Taarak. “The Cyberoam Partner Club will effectively recognize top sales talent across all levels of the channel and also reward them with monetary benefits. This will surely help in driving Cyberoam sales in the UTM market,” he adds.

It will be remembered that Cyberoam Identity-based UTM appliances offer comprehensive protection against existing and emerging Internet threats, including viruses, worms, Trojans, spyware, phishing, pharming and more. Cyberoam delivers the complete range of security features such as stateful inspection firewall, VPN, gateway anti-virus and anti-spyware gateway anti-spam, intrusion detection and prevention, content filtering in addition to bandwidth management and multiple link management over a single platform. Cyberoam solutions are certified by the ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon Business, and the Virtual Private Network Consortium. Cyberoam has also received the 2007 Global Excellence Awards for Integrated Security Appliance, Security Solution for Education and Unified Security, and the 2007 Tomorrow’s Technology Today Award for Unified Security.

Cyberoam UTM has a highly satisfied customer base with more than 2,500 installations worldwide. The Cyberoam CR appliances provide comprehensive network security to large, medium and small corporations, educational institutions and government organizations across the globe.

Digvijaysinh Chudasama, Vice-President – Sales, Cyberoam–– India, says, “The Partner Club provides recognition to top performing partners and their teams in addition to offering lucrative incentives and partner margins. This is yet another initiative from Cyberoam to provide our certified partners with the best growth opportunities in the industry. Cyberoam UTM has a unique and strong product offering which, in combination with our committed channel partners, has the potential to place Cyberoam in a leading position in the security market.”

He adds, “Within this Partner Club, we have the programme called ‘Cyberoam Champs’. With this, we want to incentivize all the customer-facing teams of the channel partners, including sales, pre-sales and post-sales.”

According to Digvijay, Cyberoam is trying to bring them under this umbrella programme. They will be enrolled and will be partnering with the company in their various different region-wise initiatives. Part of these initiatives, they will be incentivized every time they sell Cyberoam.

Digvijay adds, “We have also started the point system. Whenever the partners sell a product, they will earn points. We are also launching surprise packages for a month or for a week so that these people get engaged in selling more Cyberoam solutions on a regional basis.”

Digvijay says, “While doing this, we want to bring the like-minded people together. Sales teams which are security and networking focussed in this region also connect with each other. It does not matter for the company like us whether the sales or pre-sales person in the company remains with the company or shifts from the company because its enrollment with the Cyberoam will stay with us all the time. We are not just partnering with them in this partner programme, but we are going a step further to engage them at a more broader and personal level. We are confident that this entire activity across India-wide would garner 200 sales teams for us across India – probably more than that in the next six months. Taking a very conservative figure, 40 team members in each region, at least 7 to 8 team members in the metro cities and 20 people in the B-Class cities should be enrolled. These team members are sales and pre-sales and post-sales teams of individual partner organizations. The community will become a close-knit community where they would be sharing what kind of initiatives are going to take place to reach the end-customers easily. The entire motive of this programme is to easily reach the sales people so that they can reach the end-user.

It is definitely a different partner programme. According to Digvijay, what the competitors are doing is that they engage the partners and give them a category. But we have not followed that rule. We are trying to connect to the sales team of the channel partners. If you are connected to the sales team, you are more connected to the market.

He adds, “Normally, the market is growing at 30% CAGR and looking at the number we are working on, we are very much positive we are looking forward for 100% CAGR in 2008-09 and probably this is the right time for us to define the strategies as of now, we are working on ground level. We have taken only the first initiative. There are 3–4 initiatives which will come before March end. For us, April is the New Year of financial beginning. So, we are creating a platform for the entire New Year.”

Finally… 
Currently, Cyberoam is working on the Indian market, but as the time passes, in the next two quarters, the company will focus on the APAC region also.