At its North America Partner Council gathering in Boca Raton, Fla. RSA announced changes to its SecurWorld partner program that include new specializations and a new tier for smaller partners.

The company has changed up its training materials for partners to focus on the variety of security opportunities RSA is targeting. Joe Gabriel, EMC’s director of global channel and alliances marketing, said the new training will add solutions focus to its previous focus on product education, giving partners more immersion in RSA’s go-to-market messaging about how the products work together.

And that new training material provides the basis for new specializations, with options to specialize in Authentication and Security Management tracks.

While the Authentication track has just a single specialization underneath it – Authentication and Identity Management, there are a variety of focuses under Security Management, including Governance, Risk and Compliance, Security Information and Event Management, Data Loss Prevention and Network Monitoring.

The specializations – offered to the top three tiers of the SecurWorld program, — allow partners to get up to double the deal registration benefits of non-specialized partners. For example, for authentication products, Gabriel said deal reg margin boosts double from 10 per cent to 20 per cent.

“The new program allows smaller partners who want to get deeper in expertise to get very close to and as competitive on deal registration as those top tier partners,” Gabriel said.

While the program was announced this week, it goes into effect officially in January, and partners will have until next July to have to fit in under the new rules of the program. That said, Gabriel stressed that partners who invest in specialization training on day one will be able to recognize the benefits of those specializations immediately.

At the base of the SecurWorld partner program, the company has added a fourth tier, Authorized Partner, recognizing there’s an opportunity for smaller partners, particularly with the company’s authentication products in light of the launch of Authentication Manager Express earlier this year.

“For smaller partners, some of our minimum requirements were too high, and they didn’t have enough time to achieve them,” Gabriel said. Thus, the Authorized tier has no hard-and-fast requirements for revenue or training requirements. Gabriel said the only expectations are that the partner does $1,000 in revenues or one deal registration during the first 12 months. Doing that deal registration will require to have two sales staff and one SE completing online training that will take approximately four hours each.

Gabriel said the new tier provides an opportunity to onboard new solution providers as part of a recruitment drive for partners to support the SMB authentication opportunity, and also gives partners more time for partners interested in selling the broader range of RSA products to get through training and identify prospects.