Backup Exec Training Events

James Baker is the UK Channel Sales Manager for Symantec covering SMB. If you’re an IT provider then you may have met James manning a Symantec stand at an event, or at a user group meeting – James recently visited us at an AMITPRO event in Solihull to discuss Symantec’s Small Business offerings.

James understands the SMB market in a way few other Sales Managers I’ve met do, and, bless him, he takes some incredible flack in good humour from many of us Small Business IT company owners. We’ve moaned about Symantec’s lack of Partner Support and Training, lack of Partner NFR products, p*ss-poor Consumer Anti-Virus products, and let’s be honest, we’ve probably even blamed Symantec for the sinking of the Titanic, the Credit Crunch, and the failure to put a Monkey on Mars (yet). Yet the man takes it all in his stride with a smile, is open and honest about Symantec’s short-comings (yes, Norton Anti-Virus sucks, and yes, it’s going to take a long time for Symantec to shake that image) and discusses how Symantec can improve it’s image by working with it’s partners.

We’ve seen some real progress in how Symantec engages with the SMB Channel, thanks in no small part to James’ work. Earlier this year Symantec made NFR (Not-for-Resale) products available to it’s Partners of all levels, so we could try the myriad of Symantec products in-house before offering them to our clients, and now, good as his word when he promised to improve Partner Training, James has e-mailed me to let us know about a series of Technical Training events Symantec is running around their Backup Exec 12.5 and Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5 products:-

"Following on from the success of the recent Symantec Endpoint Protection Technical Training events, I’m pleased to announce training dates for the new versions of Backup Exec 12.5 and System Recovery 8.5.  This training is FREE!

These sessions will give an overview of the new features in BE 12.5 & BESR 8.5 – covering off support for SBS 2008 & EBS 2008, as well as the products capabilities with Backing Up Hyper-v and VMware environments, cold restores in BESR8.5, plus granular recovery of Exchange and SharePoint.

More info on the new product capabilities can be found at:  www.backupexec.com

Dates & venues

Newcastle           Friday 24^th October          Grey Street Hotel

Liverpool             Friday 31^st October          Marriott Hotel

Birmingham        Friday 7^th November       City Inn – Brindley Place

Edinburgh           Friday 14^th November    The Westerwood

London                 Friday 21^st November     The Strand Palace Hotel

Reading                Friday 28^th November    The Madjeski Stadium

Dublin                   Friday 4^th December       The Clarion Hotel

To register for one of these events please click on the registration link below:

http://www.emea.symantec.com/uk/beroadshow/"

I’ll be in attendance at the Birmingham event, as here at Netlink IT we use both Backup Exec and Backup Exec System Recovery (we still hate the name – LiveState Recovery sounded lots better – but can’t deny it’s a great product!) in nearly all of our client sites – so it’ll be great to see what the latest versions of these products can offer.

Now if James can just sort out Symantec’s SMB Support offerings for us all long suffering Partners, we’ll have no choice but to elevate him to SMB "Man of the Year"…