AVG Launches 'AVG Business' Brand
AVG Technologies is doubling down on its channel-centric SMB efforts by rebranding those parts of the company as AVG Business.
"AVG Business is a dedicated business unit within AVG with its own team and engineering, sales and marketing under the same roof," said Francois Daumard, vice president of global channel sales at AVG, in an interview.
Daumard, a former Apple and Microsoft channel executive who joined AVG in December, said the business unit, run by Mike Foreman, will remain part of AVG Technologies.
By products, AVG Business includes AVG Business Managed Workplace, an RMM suite; AVG Business CloudCare, a cloud-based security suite; a network operations center and helpdesk; and AVG CloudCare SSO, a single sign-on offering currently in beta that is a technology partnership with Centrify Corp.
On Wednesday, AVG also released a VMware ESXi service module for Managed Workplace. The VMware integration was a top request of many of AVG's 10,000 partners, Daumard said.
AVG recently completed acquisitions of Norman Safeground and Winco, and the company will continue to expand geographically through M&A, Daumard said. Distribution partnerships are another key part of the company's 2015 geographic expansion plans, he said.
"We'll continue our geographic development in 2015, and we're going to localize our product. We see a lot of opportunity for growth in Europe, for example, in Germany," he said.
In its 2014 financial results release last week, AVG said its small business segment revenues grew 18.7 percent to $58.5 million of AVG's overall $374.1 million in annual revenues.
See this feature for recent RCP coverage of AVG's channel plans and product roadmap.
Posted by Scott Bekker on February 25, 2015