Clearswift channel anniversary marks start of aggressive margins war
Content security specialist Clearswift has updated its channel programme to pay its top tier partners up to 50 percent margin on new business and on customers switching from rival products.
The vendor is also offering a 20 percent recurring revenue deal to partners while it handles all support, billing and renewals process.
The highest rate of margin is available to ‘solution providers’ within the Clearswift 3 level Catalyst programme, providing they use the firm’s deal registration tool. According to Miles Rippon, VP worldwide channels, Clearswift, “Due to our structure, partners are unlikely to compete with each other and more able to retain customers.”
Rippon highlights the strong growth in email and content security, a technology it acquired from Baltimore Technologies in 2002 via the well-regarded Minesweeper brand. Clearswift offers both appliance and software versions of its two flagship products. However, Rippon believes that its strong support for virtualisation and “single code base” makes it a highly attractive proposition for the channel.
“We have managed to attract a number of new partners that are into virtualisation but hadn’t considered email and content security,” he explains. The logic he espouses is that customers who have wholeheartedly embraced virtualisation don’t then want to deploy standalone servers or appliances that fall outside of the virtual environment.
Clearswift has reported 11 percent growth, even during the recession, but doesn’t publically provide guidance on the actual revenue numbers. The firm has also positively grown its channel to 136 partners in the UK after it ditched its old distributors Magirus and Bell Micro in favour of Sphinx last year.
Rippon believes that its channel will grow, especially as partners become nervous that certain rival vendors like Symantec will eventually get tempted to “cut out the middleman” and go direct to end customers via hosted services, without the aid of the channel.
