When is SEP SBE actually EOL?

[MIXIT]

Hi all.  As a Symantec partner, I've been hearing for months now, perhaps even over a year, about how SEP SBE will be discontinued, with an expected transition plan to SEP Cloud.  I have been in contact with some Symantec management people in the past, and was really given the impression SEP SBE would have been gone, as of January 2019.  Yet it's still around, still available to renew on.  Now for what it's worth, in PMC I get an alert that I better upgrade all customers' agents to a newer version by July 16, but that I believe is jus the new cloud agent and not representing a divergence from SEP SBE itself, though probably this is actually in preparation fro SEP Cloud.  

Anyway, I was hoping someone who actually gets clear information from Symatnec might weigh in on this, as I, a Symantec partner, do not seem to get clear communications on this topic.  grrrrr.

[MIXIT]

Almost got my own answer thanks to CraigV in another thread.  I went to "purchasse" SEP SBE and can't - it keeps pushing me towards SEP Cloud now.  It appears you can add licensing to existing SEP SBE, or perhaps even renew, but basically new purchases are all pushed towards SEP Cloud.  What I don't know is how things work in going from a Trial to paid.  As a Symatnec partner, I 'strongly dislike' the way Symantec handles this stuff.  If I want to just sell the damn product I'm not sure how it works if the customer is on a trial, but it seems like it's only doable as a direct sales path, circumventing the resller.  Maybe I'm wrong.  Anyway, comments welcome of course but I think I kind of have my answer, though it would still be nice to have defined dates instead of this confusion.  

[Saqib Anjum Ansari]

Hi,

 

This article will help you,

 

https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.TECH230872.html

 

https://support.symantec.com/us/en/article.doc8217.html

 

Thanks

[Migration User]

Hi,

As a product owner of both SEP SBE and SEP Cloud products, I'd like to first apologize if you were not getting a clear answer on your questions.

This thread was brought to my attention this morning and let me give you answes to your questions below:

1. Both SEP SBE and SEP Cloud are active products in our pricelists and have dedicated teams working on them.

2. The help topics Saqib shared earlier provide you clarity of the EOL statements - we EOL'd on-premise version of SEP SBE. Hosted/ Cloud version of SEP SBE is an active product and would remain so unless you hear from us otherwise.

3. We stopped selling SEP SBE on our e-Commerce channel after we redesigned our portal and fundamentally believe SEP Cloud is the right product for our small business customers. That is the reason of Craig V reporting the experience of Symantec e-Commerce site pushing for SEP Cloud.

4. If you have a customer who tried out SEP SBE and is happy with it, you can always convert them to paid subscriptions by transacting through any of our distribution partner. Once you recieve the fulfillment letter with a serial number, you can simply key in the serial number on the SEP SBE console. As I said above, SEP SBE is an active and transactable product in our pricelists.

5. If you have customers who like to upgrade from SEP SBE to SEP Cloud, you can use the following video from our library to help them upgrade: https://help.symantec.com/cs/SEPC/SEPC/v130431322_v101064224/Upgrade-the-SEP-SBE-devices-using-the-discover-and-deploy-method-video?locale=EN_US 

6. The notification that you are seeing in your PMC account is to upgrade your customer device's with the latest agent. Some of your customer's devices are running our old platform agent whose certificate is getting deprecated. Post July 16th, these agents will cease to work properly - so it's important that you upgrade them before that date. This in no way should be considered as a step towards upgrading to SEP Cloud or related to EOL of SEP SBE.

I hope I answered your queries. Please feel free to reach out if you have additional questions.

Warm Regards,

Amit Sharma