Senforce Switches To Indirect Sales For End-Point Security

Senforce Technologies, Draper, Utah, which has catered one-on-one to mainly government accounts, plans an aggressive channel push with a new program, channel sales organization and new products including Senforce Wi-Fi Security (SWIS), said Mike Hall, president and CEO.

Within a year, Hall said he wants to see Senforce doing 90 percent of its business through partners. Helping to orchestrate that shift in sales culture will be a new channel chief that Hall said likely will be named by August.

Senforce also plans to bring its traditionally enterprise-level end-point security portfolio to a wider audience. "We will build a midmarket channel next quarter," Hall said, referring to the August time frame.

At the heart of Senforce's product strategy is its Endpoint Security Suite (ESS), software that manages network interfaces and can sense when a device makes an unauthorized network connection, said Kip Meacham, director of technical marketing.

The reason for breaking SWIS out from ESS as a point product is twofold. First, SWIS gives VARs the ability to specifically solve the Wi-Fi security needs of end-point clients—a strategy that can keep a sales conversation alive in a customer environment that already has its other end-point security needs addressed and may not require the full ESS suite, Meacham said.

Second, selling a customer into SWIS gives VARs an inroad into the next logical step: upselling customers in ESS, or offering ESS as a displacement option for customers with existing end-point security deployments from Senforce competitors such as Check Point Software and Sygate.

Starting at $45 per seat with volume discounts available, SWIS packs features that range from automatically disabling Wi-Fi connectivity when a wired LAN is in use to guarding Bluetooth antennae and infrared ports, Meacham said.

Tracy Bingham, technical services manager at All Points Logistics, a VAR in Gainesville, Ga., that has teamed with Senforce to fulfill government contracts, said ESS is rich with added services revenue. Bingham welcomed the closer ties that Senforce's channel effort could foster.