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Symantec And Blue Coat Channel Integration By March 2017

Channel Integration

New Delhi: Symantec Corporation which acquired Blue Coat in June this year for $4.65 billion, has now expressed its active interest in integration of products, teams, and cultures, and their channels as well.

In terms of go-to-market, channels are expected to be their primary path towards distribution and sale of their products,which they will be focusing on post their merger too.

Torjus Gylstorff, the Vice-President for Global Partner Sales at Symantec said at a recent event, “The integration is well on course and our teams are working with the channels of both vendors. It is a continuous process to further align their business with Symantec’s overall vision around cybersecurity.” The merger will essentially bring together, Symantec Data Loss Prevention (DLP) with Symantec CloudSOC (formerly Blue Coat’s Elastica CloudSOC Cloud Access Security Broker CASB) and Cloud Data Protection products.

In terms of speaking about the value addition, Gylstroff said, “Our global GTM weighs heavily on the technical expertise and market reach of our channel partners. Blue Coat’s channel imparts diversity and depth to our ecosystem.”

This new joint portfolio shall address 50% + of the issues and other concerns that the customers of these organizations have. In fact the summary of what the deal essentially changes, especially after Torjus has now started working for the combined new entity, after having worked with Blue Coat before this deal came through.

[To know How Security Business Consolidation Impacts The Channels, read here]

What essentially changes

With this deal, Blue Coat itself may not have gained a whole lot, except for the fact that it will now compete in markets which Symantec has always been doing, there is still a lot of changes which are expected to change.

– Symantec’s data loss prevention solution and Blue Coat’s data science driven CASB, it will help bring data protection through an entire life cycle, get rid of cloud application blind spots, uncover any hidden data residing in the cloud infrastructure, and ensuring DLP policies are extended across the cloud and on-premise solutions.

– With the fact that Symantec has now integrated DLP and Cloud SOC, customers will now be able to get the benefits of DLP coverage for direct visibility for all the content across more than 60 applications such as Dropbox, Office 365, Google Apps, Salesforce.

– Apart from the mentioned points, Symantec’s DLP Cloud and CloudSOC solutions, will now be providing for improved content detection, activity logging, forensic investigations and policy enforcing capabilities, which will further provide for using sanctioned and unsanctioned cloud applications, and ensure the compliance with the data on cloud.

– Unlike what was previously estimated, Blue Coat’s network security, and cloud solutions would not be overlapping Symantec’s end-point, email, and DLP solutions, as per Gylstorff. This will translate into opportunities to cross-sell and upsell technologies, which have been developed at the base of both these companies.

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