Julie Parrish Partners Quotations

Launching the new partner program less than one year after one of the largest software mergers in history is a testament to Symantec's commitment to its partners and our unswerving focus on delivering both the programs and infrastructure to help ensure our mutual success in the market. Our partners are a valuable part of our company, and they are key to delivering value to customers. This first phase of the new partner program will provide partners with a simple, complete framework for doing business with Symantec.

The reason that we believe this is a really important program is it helps us proactively avoid channel conflict, particularly between partners that might be competing in deals and on occasions when Symantec and a partner are competing for the same deal. By registering the deal, we know who got there first.

Ours is similar to other opportunity registration programs that are out there. And the basic concept is that companies provide additional margin opportunities for partners who register opportunities with them.

It's very important to partners that we bring this out slowly. We've been tracking and measuring partners predominantly on volume, which doesn't recognize our smaller partners.

It's only for those partners who are authorized to sell our enterprise-type products, so this isn't really for the lower-end Windows-based anti-virus and backup type products.