SonicWall's One For All

The Sunnyvale, Calif., security vendor this week is unveiling its aggressively priced TotalSecure bundles, which combine a firewall and VPN appliance with a one-year subscription of gateway antivirus, antisypware, content filtering, intrusion prevention, firmware updates and 8x5 support, said Lief Koepsel, director of product marketing.

The bundles come in three configurations: TotalSecure 10 for up to 10 users, TotalSecure 25 for up to 25 users, and TotalSecure Enterprise, for up to 100 users.

The bundles are designed to help SonicWall partners go after the emerging unified threat-management market with an all-in-one security solution, Koepsel said.

Bundling those features into one product makes the complicated issue of security “easier for the customer to absorb,” said Koji Mori, general manager of network services at CalSoft Systems, a Torrance, Calif., solution provider.

“No matter how you break it down, you are always going to run into a customer who just won&'t understand security technology,” Mori said. “These packages allow us to offer them a simple choice, one solution that protects them from all the threats.”

While all of the options had been previously available, creating a single SKU with a marketing push behind it will make it easier to sell, Mori added. “Once you present a nontechnical customer with a firewall and start talking about the different security options, their eyes start to glaze over,” he said. “And if you&'re dealing with someone in purchasing, they will always ask for just the firewall, because that&'s what they have been directed to buy.”

Steve Weeks, president of Netcetera, a North Vancouver, British Columbia, solution provider, said his company had been selling similar packages but that the bundles will likely expand those sales. “For small-business customers, you are often talking to a business owner, someone who isn&'t technical,” Weeks said. “It&'s a lot easier to tell them you have one solution that will take care of them.”

And while some 98 percent of companies already have a firewall, with pricing starting at $534 for TotalSecure 10 and topping out at $4,490 for TotalSecure Enterprise, the new bundles have the potential to replace many customers&' existing firewalls, Weeks said.

“For customers with lower-end firewalls, this gives the antivirus, antispyware and IPS at the gateway, so it&'s an obvious upgrade,” he said. “But, on the other end, if customers with a Check Point or Cisco firewall have a maintenance renewal coming up, it&'s cheaper to replace it with a SonicWall.”

TotalSecure bundles do simplify security for nontechnical customers, and they allow partners to handle transactional business more quickly, Koepsel said. “In the past, our strength has been in the consultative selling space, where our partners configure a custom solution for the customer,” he said. “But there are customers who know exactly what they need and would rather just buy it.”