I received this email from SonicWALL today:
Dear John,
Today Dell® announced its intention to acquire SonicWALL®. The transaction is anticipated to close during Dell’s second quarter of its fiscal year. We are very excited about the opportunity this offers both SonicWALL and our partners. All of us at SonicWALL greatly value our partners. After all, our channel partners have made significant contributions to our growth. We believe that with the additional resources Dell can provide, we will accelerate our growth and expand our network security and data protection solutions. Dell has demonstrated a strong understanding of the extremely complex and rapidly changing security landscape. The acquisition of SonicWALL is the next step in Dell’s strategy to expand its security solutions capabilities for customers and simplify management of their IT infrastructure. We are pleased that SonicWALL will become Dell’s center of excellence for security appliance solutions.
Dell and SonicWALL both have award-winning channel programs and believe preserving the channel go-to-market strategy is a key element of our future success. As of today there are no changes to our relationship. Like Dell has with other acquisitions, they intend to offer SonicWALL’s existing channel partners an opportunity to join the Dell PartnerDirect Program, which should enable you to preserve the investments you made with SonicWALL. Dell plans to take the very best of the SonicWALL channel programs and model and combine it with PartnerDirect to bring the best to channel members. Dell’s PartnerDirect program is available in 148 countries with more than 100,000 partners worldwide.
We want to assure our partners that we are committed to your success and while we are excited, we don’t want this to be a distraction. During the closing process, it is important that we all maintain a business-as-usual mentality and focus on closing deals in the current quarter. You have our commitment that we will continue to communicate how the acquisition will affect the way you work with SonicWALL.