The VAR Guy

Kaspersky Lab peppered the first day of its 2011 Americas Partner Conference in Riviera Maya, Mexico, with a slew of new product announcements and partner offerings as well as hints of upcoming technologies designed to strengthen its partners’ collective bottom line.

The first of the new offers is a small-business offering called Kaspersky Small Office Security, providing robust security in a package designed to fit the SMB market. “We are delivering premium small-business protection that includes central management, protection for up to 10 PCs and 2 servers, business data protection, employee web use control, password management, file shredding and other features, all complemented by high-quality support,” said Randy Drawas, Kaspersky CMO. Small Office Security will be available by the end of this quarter.

The company also announced a new managed offering that allows Kaspersky partners to provide an annuity-based service for their client. Details on the new service were not available, but the company did note the service will be available “fairly soon.”

On the partner tools side, Kaspersky VP of corporate marketing Gary Mullen noted in 2010 the company created more than 120 different sales tools including white papers, co-marketing materials and more, all designed to help partners increase brand awareness and increase their sales. This year, the company plans to redesign its Americas partner portal to a more streamlined, easier to use repository for sales, marketing and technical information. “Right now we have two portals for the Americas – one in English and another for the Latin American partners – and there are a lot of inconsistencies and sometimes they are difficult to get into. This new one will be a single portal for all information, sales tools and other partner-focused information,” Mullen said. “There will be consistent messaging and it will be unified across the Americas. It will have a clean, intuitive and customizable interface with a single sign-on gateway.”

The company also is launching a new program to incentivize its partners with cold, hard cash – the Kaspersky Total Rewards program, a partner loyalty and incentives program that rewards them with reloadable debit-type cards for various activities including training, contributing to high customer satisfaction and more, Mullen said. The program officially launches Tuesday, Feb. 8, through the partner portal, and to get things kicked off, partners can request $25 cards from their channel managers that they can then give to their sales force.

“We want to inspire and engage our partners to increase our channel loyalty and extend the partner lifecycle,” he said. “This is part of our improvement strategies to reward and recognize, deliver targeted education, and have continuous communication with our partners.”

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