Symantec Launches New Partner Services Programs

New Consulting and Technical Assistance offerings provide access to Symantec best practices, and support to drive partner revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction

CUPERTINO, Calif.– Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced two new Symantec Services Programs designed to help partners enhance their services portfolio to meet customers’ needs, and grow revenue by providing them with access to Symantec consulting best practices and support. The Symantec Authorized Consulting Partner Program and Symantec Authorized Technical Assistance Partner Program are the first of a number of partner-specific programs that Symantec plans to introduce over the next 12 to 18 months.

“Customers look to partners who provide a complete offering of products, services and support—particularly for more complex products or customer environments,” said Kurt Klein, chief executive officer, CMT. “Services are crucial to maximize a customer’s return on their technology investments, ensuring proper implementation and configuration, complemented by efficient operational processes incorporating IT best practices.”

With the Symantec Authorized Consulting Partner Program, partners can broaden their existing consulting capabilities and offer a wide range of advanced services leveraging Symantec’s expertise and best practices in security, compliance, systems and storage management. The Symantec Authorized Consulting Partner Program will enable partners to build a more profitable consulting practice through enhancing their expertise with access to Symantec’s consulting best practices, technical training and advanced support. Additional partner benefits include co-marketing opportunities to leverage the Symantec brand and differentiate their business in a competitive marketplace, joint business planning, priority access to Symantec Enterprise Support, and technical job shadowing.

As customer needs continue to evolve, Symantec plans to provide partners with additional resources through the Symantec Authorized Technical Assistance Partner Program to expand levels of customer assistance for Symantec solutions, and offer additional value-add services. Focused on increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty, this program offers technical assistance training for key volume products including Backup Exec and Symantec AntiVirus, and real-time priority telephone access to Symantec experts to help partners resolve customer needs more quickly. Both of these new programs offer partners the benefit of serving as the local provider managing the account activity, allowing partners to drive dialogues around additional business requirements, and satisfy the customer’s need for additional services.

These new partner programs are the latest offerings from Symantec Global Services. In April 2007, Symantec introduced its new online software platform Symantec Protection Network. Offered through Symantec’s channel partner network, the Symantec Protection Network will provide small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) with comprehensive protection for IT through a wide range of Web-delivered availability and security offerings. Symantec Online Backup, currently being offered in beta form, is the first of many planned offerings to be delivered through the Symantec Protection Network. Symantec Online Backup will provide customers with cost-effective, secured, and reliable Web-based backup and restoration of critical data.

“With the launch of these new Symantec Partner Services Programs, we are continuing our 20-year history of partner investments by making Symantec’s best practices and support available to partners who want to build or strengthen their services practice,” said Greg Hughes, group president, Symantec Global Services. “As a leader in providing solutions for managing IT risk and maximizing IT performance, we are pleased to offer our partners the latest in services solutions for security, data protection and data recovery.”

Symantec is committed to bringing more opportunity to its partners worldwide and plans to extend this commitment with additional service offerings in the upcoming year. For more information on Symantec Partner Services and availability, visit http://www.symantec.com/partners.