Cleaning up the channel

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Antivirus software vendor Kaspersky recently hosted its first ever Middle East and Africa channel conference in Dubai, giving more than 70 partners a taste of what they can expect from the company this year. Channel Middle East was there to grill the two men behind Kaspersky’s local channel strategy — regional managing director Tarek Kuzbari and channel manager Aman Manzoor.

How much more work is there to do to your Middle East channel strategy?

Tarek Kuzbari: There is still lots of work to do because we have recently started here in the region, opening our office back in November. We have already started to issue our first channel programme, which is going to organise all our channel relations. You are definitely going to see lots of improvement on that programme in the next two years, but we prefer to do that step-by-step so that we can collect feedback and see how the market reacts.

Have partners started shifting to the new programme and how will this impact the structure of your channel?

Aman Manzoor: I think around 90% of that process has already started. The key thing here is focus and making sure the partner’s corporate strategy or core competencies are actually reflected in the way they associate with Kaspersky. With the old partner programme, the major difference was that a corporate reseller selling into a corporate customer was also required to sell retail products, when it didn’t have so much competency there. With the new partner programme we are able to focus on the core competencies and maybe add value to that, which is the essence of it.

Has it been too easy to become a Kaspersky partner in the past?

TK: Yes, because we were new in the region and we were offering the chance to enter this market to any company that was interested in becoming a partner. But we are now going to focus more on our partners — we are looking for ones that are going to add more value to our products, presence and customers. There were not that many requirements for being a partner before, but that is changing.

So will this enhanced focus on partners open the door to new ones or see the overall number reduced?

TK: It will actually open the door to new partners. Right now in the region we have around 24 direct partners and this region requires more partners in terms of distributors, enterprise partners and also resellers. We need to grow, but we must ensure we do it in the best way without causing any kind of conflict between the new partners and the old partners. It is important to maintain the interests of all of them.

Kaspersky tends to be seen as a very technical, product-driven company, rather than a channel-centric organisation. What would be your response to that?

AM: We are a 100% channel-driven company — we don’t sell directly to customers at all. That should answer the question.

TK: That is especially the case in the Middle East. Because we are from the region we know a lot about the market, but there are still things we have to learn. And nobody can define what the requirements of the customers are better than our local partners. They are in direct contact with their customer so we know how important it is to deal with them to achieve that.

Kaspersky is permitted to sell into markets that its US competitors are restricted from, such as Iran and Syria. How are you looking to take advantage of this?

TK: In Iran we have more than 60% market share and in Syria we are number one in a lot of companies. We are really looking to invest more in these markets because they are promising markets with growth potential, even though there are still a lot of competitors, such as BitDefender, ESET and Avira, that are able to sell there too.

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