Mississauga, Ont. – Last year little known Alternative Technology Inc. (Altech) opened a 26,000 square-foot shop in Canada as a Citrix-focused distributor.
Besides Citrix, Altech also carried products from companies that are not well known names such as Watchguard, Tarantella, Packateer, SonicWall
and Markham, Ont.-based Perle Networks.
A year later, the company has added to its offerings with products from Vericept Corp., Secure Computing Corp., Tigi Corp., ThinPrint Inc., and Mxlogic. These new vendors are all trying to capture marketshare in the growing security field in Canada.
The strategy behind this wave of product infusion is about high margins with professional services for products that are not available to the masses, said Terry Sedgley, Altech’s regional manager for Canada.
Currently, Altech carries between 30 to 35 product lines here.
Vericept, an Internet tracking software developer from Englewood, Colo., has partnered with Altech in hopes of finding Canadian VARs who either have, or are creating a security practice.
Ken Totura, director, partner development at Vericept said security – especially identity theft – is a growing concern for corporations.
“Banks spend $1 billion combating fraud and have on average 68,000 cases of fraudulent credit cards. Identity theft is the fastest growing crime in North America,” Totura said.
Vericept’s flagship product, View, comes in many flavours including one for information protection.
“There are a lot of bad guys out there unfortunately, but the good news for you is there is a big opportunity in security,” Totura said.
View solutions come with a 25 per cent discount to VARs, he added. However, Totura said a number of VARs maintain the margin off the list price.
His advice to Canadian VARs is to not discount the product but to change the scope of its offering, by limiting some of the monitoring services, for example.
“VARs historically enjoy the full margin with Vericept. We are not commodity based and you are crazy if you discount it. I will not be a volume king, but a margin king and drive a lot of service revenue,” Totura said.
Of Altech’s other new lines:
- Secure Computing develops network security products that enable VARs to create trusted environments inside and outside of customer organizations.
- Thinprint Inc. is a provider of software based solutions for the transmission of print jobs in server, Web-based environments and portable computing.
- Tigi offers data-throughput acceleration solutions for server, network and ultra-high speed storage systems.
- Mxlogic’s Email Defense Service provides email protection to safeguard against spam, viruses, worms and malicious content.