MOUNTAIN VIEW – Trend Micro wants its existing channel solution partners to aggressively sell into a rapidly growing SaaS security market by way of its complete, channel-friendly portfolio of hosted endpoint, hosted email and hosted Website security products for small and medium-sized businesses, and it is launching a new SaaS for the Channel program to enable partners sell these hosted products.

Citing a 2008 IDC report that stated “SaaS thrives in down cycles, and as with the 2000-01 downturn that gave Saleforce.com its start, the current freeze in IT and related capital expenditure spending will assure solid growth for most SaaS providers”, Frank Long, vice president of marketing for Trend Micro, discussed three initiatives his company is making from a hosted security perspective.

“The first is our SaaS for the Channel program with a very heavy emphasis on channel partners. We’re 100 percent channel-focused and the channel is our main route to market. As we get into the hosted security space, we’ve going to leverage the channel for that route to market as well,” he said. “In doing so, we’re really capturing the concerns and requirements of our channel partners such as ensuring they have increased account control, service revenue, speeding up their cash flow and increasing the speed of their sales cycles.

“Even if we do take a service and offer it online, they’re a big part of that story.”

Essentially, Trend Micro is aiming to help their partners make more money and to sell more Trend Micro products, Long said. “Partners typically get a little weary when they see their vendor partners go into cloud computing or SaaS or hosted security and so forth.”

Industry experts like leading analyst IDC are projecting that the SaaS market overall will grow by more than 40 percent annually in the next five years, with customer adoption of SaaS products projected to accelerate in the current economic downturn.

“As the economy has declined into a recession the software-as-a-service on the whole from a security perspective has increased. It’s true to our business as well. Our hosted email security business has grown like a hockey stick; a 50 to 60 percent growth year-over-year and our channel partners of course are benefiting with us,” he said. “While this is a time of ‘do more with less’ and keeping your hardware a little longer instead of swapping it out and pushing out some of those decisions to next year, hosted security becomes a viable option.”

The partner program includes the following benefits for existing partners:

Incremental channel reward compensation to channel partners when selling hosted endpoint, hosted email or hosted Website security products from Trend Micro.

Hosted security product trial request lead generation, with leads to be distributed to named channel solution partners.

Free hosted security sales and product training.

Improved renewal management with Worry-Free Remote Manager support for hosted security products, and 100 percent channel involvement in hosted security renewal fulfillment.

Trend Micro Worry-Free Business Security Hosted for small offices protects multiple PCs and notebooks located in or out of the office from viruses and other threats. With single-install security, customers can centrally manage security from anywhere without adding a server or installing server software. Trend Micro hosts and updates the service for you. Since Trend Micro hosts the Web security console, customers may easily manage and review security from anywhere without requiring a server or impacting existing server resources. Protection against threats from the Web is constantly updated by Trend Micro security experts and won’t cause computer slowdown.

Worry-Free Remote Manager enables channel solution partners to centrally manage multiple InterScan Messaging Hosted Security customers from anywhere through one secure, hosted Web console. Resellers using Worry-Free Remote Manager — enabling partners to have greater account control is a critical tool that’s free of charge to all Trend Micro channel solution partners — will be also able to be able to directly manage InterScan Messaging Hosted Security customer licensing and renewals.

In the second half of 2009, Worry-Free Remote Manager channel solution partners will also be able to manage Worry-Free Business Security Hosted and Trend Micro SecureSite.

“SecureSite has been very well-received by partners; we’ve been able to give them an avenue to build a whole new set of security services,” he said. “It’s an adjacent market for them to get into.”

Channel partners can gain more trust — and more business — from their customers by protecting their online revenue with Trend Micro SecureSite. SecureSite is a hosted Website security service helping protect e-commerce sites by scanning for Website vulnerabilities that threaten online privacy, revenue and business reputation. Selling SecureSite will help them earn additional revenues by attaching their remediation services. With SecureSite, partners are not just selling a product they’re selling their expertise and services.

“You can still get infections from various means . . . Websites are probably one of the biggest culprits,” he said. “This is a service our partners can sell . . . it can take a Website and ensure that site doesn’t have any vulnerabilities . . . it’ll also do constant monitoring . . . the huge value for customers here is we’re adding another layer of services our partners can offer. It’s a huge market, there’s a lot of opportunity out there today.”

Trend Micro’s hosted solutions are powered by Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, a cloud-client security infrastructure that protects customers from Web threats before they can damage the network. By querying in-the-cloud Web, email and file databases, Trend Micro Smart Protection Network provides instant, real-time protection compared to traditional methods of security.

For resellers, this means getting updates out to clients quicker, helping to guarantee that remote workers are getting their updates, and not slowing down PCs and laptops, Long said.

This column was written by Liam Lahey of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMarCompany

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