But as enticing as it is to fatten the bottom line by pushing new technologies, it takes planning and a willingness to accommodate tradeoffs. "You need to prepare accordingly and you need to do it before you go back to your customer," says ACPL's Bindra. "Web applications, firewalls, DLP, IRM all have a direct impact on business as their implementation cycles are longer," says Bindra.

That's a sentiment that S.T. Muneer Ahamed, MD, Digital Track Solutions echoes. At the network security and storage solution company, Ahamed says they've noticed that overall margins of new technologies are better than basic security technologies, but sales cycles are longer.

Some of that extra margin comes from the fact that customers also see security products like AV, firewalls, and UTM as commodities--but not so technologies like DLP. "Many customers expect free implementations of AV and firewalls," says Prabhakar at Esteem Infotech. "However, they are willing to pay a premium for a professional implementation. After we complete a DLP project, for instance, we have documentation that goes into 70 to 80 pages, and we also provide training to the employees of our customer," he says. Esteem Infotech caters to customers for DLP, encryption, and application control with a minimum of 501 end points.

The margins that qualified partners expected is justified, says Bindra, since security is an industry where skilled manpower and consulting services come at a premium. His company, for example, recently won three DLP orders in the span of a month--orders that were sold by other partners who could not implement or showcase the value of the technology.

"It is no more a plain vanilla sell," agrees Prabhakar.