Spotlight on Partner Opportunity with Email Security
Earlier in October, we kicked off a new series to spotlight the range of great opportunities Exchange can bring to your business. One of the objectives of these “Spotlight on" Partner Opportunity” posts, is to demonstrate how the advanced capabilities--or what I like to call the “Hero Workloads”--we’ve delivered in Exchange 2010 offer you the opportunity to develop specialized, high-value practices to your customers, which in turn, should translate to higher services revenue.
We kicked off the series by sharing how Dimension Data continues to see new opportunities with archiving in their Exchange engagements. This blog post brings you the next installment of our series and focuses on the opportunities email security can bring your business.
So, without further ado:
Taking a macro-level view, email anti-virus/anti-spam (AV/AS) is projected to be a $4B market by 2012 per IDC.
To pile on, in a study this year, Forrester Research surveyed ITDMs (IT Decision Makers) and BDMs (Business Decision Makers) at 400 North American companies and found that integration with email security is a top evaluation criteria for purchasing email.
No surprise, right?
And, if you take into account the momentous demand we are seeing from customers to get to the latest release, the fact customers love the release, and bear in mind that anti-virus/anti-spam is one of the most compelling features customers are looking for, this creates a great opportunity for you to position, consult and deploy email security capabilities in Exchange 2010.
Partners like Avtex recognize this customer demand and are taking advantage of these additional services opportunities:
"Companies are faced with many challenges of how to provide consistent and quality real-time and non-real-time communications to their employees, partners, and customers. More and more, the standard for communications has been expanded to a multitude of devices. With this explosion of multiple interfaces, it is critically important to protect sensitive corporate information. Exchange 2010's advanced email security features provide integrated, controlled, and manageable ways to deliver world-class messaging. Avtex continues to see growth in our business as it relates to securing the foundation for UC deployments, specifically Exchange 2010 projects."
- Khai Tran, Vice President of UC Solutions at Avtex
It’s a win-win when you upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. Delivering email security requires specialization that leads to higher-touch customer engagements with the opportunity for more services dollars for your organization. Customers in turn can reduce costs or complexity while benefiting from the Forefront functionality that earned Microsoft a Leader position in the 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Secure Email Gateways.
So what’s next?
- Use the technology to protect your own businesses (like Forefront Online Protection for Exchange)
- Upsell your customers on the email security capabilities in Exchange 2010. You can use things like the recent Gartner MQ I referenced just above to help start that conversation.
- Earn the new Gold Messaging competency, and demonstrate your advanced expertise to your current and prospective Exchange customers.
Are you seeing great opportunities to with email security?
Post a comment and share!
Ian
Group Product Manager
Exchange Partner Marketing