This morning, SIM appliance maker TriGeo announced a competitive upgrade offer specifically targeting High Tower customers [press coverage here]. Is this behavior (and that of ArcSight's) acceptable? Is it the mark of the times, or does it speak to a downward spiral of lowball marketing tactics? Some may even feel it that it's merely business as usual in the competitive landscape of the SIEM market. Either way, we'll be watching to see who else joins in the dogpile on the Hight Tower corpse.
TriGeo Follows ArcSight’s Lead and Piles on High Tower
SIEM Market Narrows with High Tower’s Flameout
Despite a strong marketing presence and continued channel partner growth, Aliso Viejo, CA based High Tower Software threw in the towel last week [news coverage here]. Before the body was even cold, SIEM competitor Arcsight jumped on the chance by buying what was undoubtedly a cheap keyword (hightower), with these Google ads:
Symantec “Change” in VAR Strategy No Change at All
As Shimel picked up earlier this week, CRN/ChannelWeb dropped what they undoubtably thought was a quite a bomb [article here]. According to the article (and eWeek's sensationalist version here) Symantec was going to strip their own channel of the top 900 global accounts, taking them all direct. According to some, this sort of strategy is what helped bring ISS down. Not quite believing what we were reading (it just seemed a bit, well…crazy and irrational), we dug deeper.
After a few calls, into Symantec, their channel partners, and the financial community, we learned that this was not a new strategy at all. It seems that Big yellow has always allowed their bigger customers to go direct, even if a channel partner registered the deal and brought it to the table. While this seems to "poison the channel", as Shimel said, I have been assured that in most (but not all cases) if the partner registers the deal, but the customer goes direct, then the VAR still gets a 'kickback' on the deal from Symantec. Now, I don't know if this common amongst other vendors, but this does show another leverage point for the buyer. If you can save a few points on the deal by going direct with Symantec, but a VAR did the legwork, then you know a bit of the deal will flow back to them. This is a clear indicator that a little more can be squeezed out of the deal to your advantage. It also means that an interesting dynamic can be created by pitting Symantec against their own channel for the business. In short, the VARs need to work very hard to put the Value back in their name.
Symantec's COO, Enrique Salem's response to the firestorm, forwarded to us by our concerned colleagues, is pasted below the fold.
Also, the PDF of Salem's original comments to Wall Street , quoted int eh above mentioned articles, can be found here. Page 25 seems to be where all of this noise started.
The Tao of Security or: How I learned to stop worrying and love GRC (part 2 of 2)
(Continued from Part 1.) The same risk management principles that help management hone and scope SOX audits general also apply to other prescriptive guidance, as well as IT frameworks and standards like the ISO 27000 series, CobiT, and NIST 800-series guides.
© 2008 Brightfly, Inc.
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