Symantec rolls out partner university

Security vendor, Symantec, is launching its partner university initiative globally.

The vendor’s vice-president of global channel office, Julie Parrish, who was in Sydney this week for the Symantec Vision roadshow, said Symantec University for Partners will feature a combination of structured learning techniques and specialised curriculum for sales staff, engineers, service and consulting personnel.

“It will allow individuals to achieve specific certifications,” she said. “We’ll have free online training and virtual classrooms available, so the individuals don’t have to leave their office. It’s pretty flexible for our partners.”

With Symantec’s broad product portfolio, Parrish said it was important to have the right training tools in place to help them take advantage of its technology.

To gain access to the university, resellers need to be part of Symantec’s partner program.

“We’ve had excellent online sales training for a long time and very high-end technical certifications as well but we really needed to close that gap in the middle with pre-sales technical support to help our partners better understand what the product does,” Parrish said. “We’ve tried to focus to make the training much more flexible and each partner, depending on where they fit, can pick or choose what’s best for them.”

Senior director of channel sales, David Dzienciol, said the Australian version of the university would feature additional training around taxonomy messaging.

“That will be around how to look at the solutions and how to take a broader approach to understanding the entire offering rather than point-by-point products,” he said. “We’ll continue to invest time in training our partners on all of our products and also provide licence training through PartnerNet.”

Over the next few months Symantec will introduce additional courses through the university, access to Symantec technical product documentation and an interactive tool called SymBrain, which helps partners find the right solution for a variety of business issues.