Storage and Security Converge in the Channel

Once upon a time conventional wisdom held that convergence of security and storage was all but inevitable, which led to the acquisition of Veritas by Symantec and RSA by EMC. But as we all soon learned, what looks good on paper doesn’t always reflect reality as the selling motions for security and storage have thus far remained distinct.

But as customers get more aware about the need to secure their data, not just their network perimeters, the folks at Huawei Symantec Technologies are betting there will be a lot more convergence regarding the acquisition and integration of security and storage technologies in the years ahead.

To help facilitate that process Huawei Symantec this week kicked off its first partner conference to launch a new Wingman partner program, which is the company’s first attempt at creating a formal channel program. At the moment, Huawei Symantec only has about 100 partners. But Jane Li, general manager for North America for Huawei Symantec in the U.S. is betting that the fact the company’s ability to leverage manufacturing in China to deliver aggressively priced state-of-the-art storage and security products that are sold only through the channel is going to soon resonate with a lot more partners. To back up that point, the company unveiled today at the Wingman conference a Dorado 2100 solid-state disk subsystem that packs up to 24 SSDs in a 2u rack to deliver 135 I/O operations per second.

In particular, Li says that partners are tired of selling against vendors that continue to push product sales in one form or another direct. Huawei Symantec, which she notes sells through the channel only, gives solution providers access to a portfolio of complementary products that are becoming easier to sell together as customers look for solutions that combine storage and network security.

There’s no doubt that data security issues are now top of mind for most IT organizations, which is creating new opportunities for the channel to combine storage and security technologies in a more comprehensive solution. The challenge now is just figuring out what is the most profitable way to take advantage of that opportunity.