Kaspersky Case Study

KASPERSKY’S BUSINESS OBJECTIVES

Kaspersky continues to rapidly advance its market position, demonstrating significant growth in all regions supported by a substantial indirect sales channel. Their indirect channel is crucial to success; therefore it was key to improve the company’s channel management capability efficiently and cost-effectively while extending Kaspersky’s competitive lead. Kaspersky recognized that existing systems were not able to facilitate this; specifically that CRM combined with mere portal offerings were incapable of meeting the increasingly sophisticated needs of their channel. They required a high-performance, highly available, and a highly scalable purpose-built B2B collaboration & multi-channel communication solution.

This had to facilitate sales, marketing and program automation and a broad range of community collaboration features. These included channel partner self-profiling and self-segmentation, sales lead and opportunity collaboration, collaborative joint business planning, an environment for information and best practice sharing, training, certification and accreditation achievement automation. Equally important were reporting and analytical tools, joint-marketing program automation and community feedback solicitation tools. All of these were required to have seamless integration with Kaspersky’s existing CRM systems.

Kaspersky defined a set of high-level objectives for indirect channel enablement including but not limited to:

• Raising channel partner credibility and competency
• Promoting channel partner differentiation
• Increasing market visibility for both the channel partner and Kaspersky
• Driving channel revenue and profitability
• Strengthening vendor-channel partner relationships (including collaboration and communication)

“Zift provides a powerful, highly available and scalable purpose-built solution to handle all aspects of our channel collaboration and communication through a wide variety of mediums, and it integrates seamlessly with our other systems including Salesforce CRM.”

– Chris Doggett, SVP, Corporate Sales, North America for Kaspersky Lab

KASPERSKY’S TIMELINE

Kaspersky wanted to initiate the implementation for their North American markets quickly and to go live in the Summer of 2012 in order to support their aggressive business targets and the chosen technology provider would have to adhere to strict and challenging timescales.

KASPERSKY’S SELECTION PROCESS

Kaspersky initially engaged with Zift and other potential providers of portal offerings in 2010 and again in 2011 sampling the market to enable them to define their technical and functional requirements before running a formal RFP process in the Fall of 2011 with a shortlist of three suppliers.

KASPERSKY’S DECISION TO GO WITH ZIFT

This process helped them to conclude that they needed far more than a mere “partner portal”. The market remains crowded with CRM vendors and software companies offering enterprise collaboration and communication solutions but there are very few companies who take collaboration and multi-channel communication beyond the enterprise. Kaspersky concluded that Zift stood out from the crowd due to its uniqueness on this key point.

ZIFT’S IMPLEMENTATION

Once commissioned Zift’s team of experts worked with Kaspersky on the following:

• Translation of business needs into clear and concise functional requirements and specifications
• Detailed solution design workshops
• Detailed solution demonstrations
• Detailed Salesforce.com CRM integration design and data mapping
• Zift product strategy and roadmap disclosure
• Budgeting and affordability analysis
• Delivery of a formal Statement of Work including a phased functionality implementation plan
• Commercial terms negotiation

ZIFT’S SOLUTION

Zift designed a phased implementation schedule that enabled delivery of the complete solution by way of addressing Kaspersky’s most urgent business priorities first.

High priorities included:

• Salesforce.com CRM integration
• Deployment of a global multi-lingual portal
• Sales and marketing automation
• Replication of essential programs to ensure consistency for channel partners while improving on process and efficiency before new programs were added and automated
• Building of a Zift custom quote tool on the same platform

KASPERSKY’S BENEFITS

The benefits that Kaspersky have enjoyed and continue to enjoy since going live in the summer of 2012 include:

• Significant improvements in channel collaboration including recruitment, on-boarding, training and certification as well as joint-sales opportunity management and customer quotation
• Increased channel recruitment (more companies and more individuals than ever before selling their products)
• Improved on-boarding (sales, marketing and technical people becoming effective faster and more eager to press ahead with formal training and enablement)
• Increased uptake of training and certification programs (better trained sales, marketing and technical resources engaging with their customers)
• Remote collaboration with communities of individuals across its channel in joint selling, marketing and support
• Targeted communications to ensure that they are timely, pertinent, of interest and of value to the recipient
• Social network integration
• Multi-lingual portal
• Increased growth and profitability through improved communication and collaboration with intermediaries

SUMMARY

Kaspersky Lab approached Zift to provide a scalable channel collaboration and multi-channel communication platform that integrated with and extended its existing Salesforce.com implementation while supporting certain custom features. Zift offered the capability to connect their global indirect sales channel to the internal tools, information and resources they needed such that Kaspersky Lab could deliver on the promise of providing high-impact solutions and sales benefits, enhanced intermediary offerings, whilst increasing their revenue. Direct feedback from Kaspersky is highly positive, citing Zift as a key enabler in channel success.