Channel Post speaks to Peter Colsted, the CEO of Secunia, about the company’s channel strategies in place and how it has been doing business in the Middle East region.
Why did Secunia conduct its international channel partner conference in Dubai?
Dubai is an important market for us. We have lots of partners here and Dubai being a hub for the Middle East region, it makes sense to conduct our international channel partner conference here. Dubai is also an easy place to get to and we have a very strong collaboration with Microsoft in this region and they were kind enough to host us here at their Dubai Internet City facility.
What feedback have you received from your partners regarding this partner conference?
We decided to go full channel years ago and hence we put in lots of efforts into creating one of the best channel partner programmes. We have been working with the channel for 22 years and we understand how important it is to have a comprehensive partner programme.
It indeed is one our biggest achievements – creating a partner programme that cater to our partners’ needs. We are also building a partner enablement programme – an online way to train our partners first of all, which will be further supported by on-premise training.
Since we have built a channel there are some key KPIs we are monitoring. One is to have a strong distribution channel in place. We have a two-tier distribution model in this region. We have EMT who is doing a great job in this region.
How has Middle East market been so far for Secunia?
When we signed up EMT for our distribution channel, they were quite upbeat. They came quickly onboard and got trained and certified. Then we started working towards recruiting key channel partners for this region.
We are now focusing on the pipeline building and making sure the knowledge transfer happens within our channel community so that they can sell our solutions better. It has taken time to build an efficient channel engine. I am pleased by how fast everything fell into place in the Middle East region.
We have gotten traction faster here and the revenue we are generating has exceeded expectations compared to what we are generating in other markets. We have a very good coverage with partners in the Middle East region.
What’s been the response for your channel partner programme?
We started onbaording partners into our channel partner programme at the beginning of the calendar year. Throughout this year we have been onboarding more and more partners.
EMT has been a key driver in getting quality partners into the network. We have received positive feedback from our channel community about the partner programme we have in place, though we continuously strive to make it better.
