Frank Rauch: Check Point Partner Program Evolving Since 2020

Check Point Software Technologies partners have a lot to look forward to in the coming months, including an evolved Check Point partner program and tools to help them achieve their objective.

That’s according to Frank Rauch, Check Point’s head of worldwide channel. We normally catch up with him early in the year at Check Point’s annual CPX360 conference. But because of the pandemic, we connected virtually.

Check Point’s Frank Rauch

“I know I’m dying to get back on the road,” he said.

Partners can expect to see better interaction with Check Point’s field teams as the pandemic subsides, Rauch said.

“Everybody has done a lot of virtual teaming together,” he said. “Now they’re ready to really be able to execute as we get out of the first quarter, as we go live and as we start to show up together. And I think it’s going to be a really great year.”

Last summer, Check Point unveiled a cloud distribution marketplace program with Arrow and Ingram Micro. The Check Point Distribution Marketplace Program helps partners reach new customers and sectors with Check Point’s cloud security services.

The program features enablement, marketing support, flexible financing and consumption models for partners. Furthermore, it builds on the Check Point Partner Growth Program launched in January 2020 to further accelerate and grow channel success.

In a Q&A with Channel Futures, Rauch talks about how the Check Point partner program has evolved during the pandemic. He also shares what’s ahead in 2021.

Channel Futures: What’s new for Check Point partners in 2021?

Frank Rauch: The way I look at it, we want to be able to evolve from 2020. And that might be the understatement of the year. But we introduced some fairly significant changes in 2020. What we try to do this year is evolve to be able to optimize around those changes. We are committed to giving partners better predictability, profitability, etc. And we’re able to do that. We were able to refine our deal registration program. We have terrific incentives — 25% for new customers, 15% for emerging technologies. All that stuff was great.

We needed to be able to make it more predictable, and we made some operational changes to do that. Our field is much better aligned to be able to work with partners on emerging tech and new customers. So I think that’s positive. We also told partners we were going to execute on some operational changes. We told them we’re going to do better on business planning. We’re going to do better on quarterly business reviews (QBRs) and we were going to be able to optimize some of the things we had in place, such as Engage, as well as developing a community … called CheckMates.

We were extremely successful on the end-user side and we wanted to bridge that over to the partner side. When we look at the results right now, we have probably about three times the number of users per month than we did when we were in New Orleans (in January 2020) on Engage. The business planning process has been implemented. The QBR tools are there and they’re meaningful. We’ve made the enhancements to Engage. We’ve added the collaborative dashboard. And we’ve added chat with an expert. We give them alerts, not just …