A Toronto solutions and service provider has moved into the distribution business by picking up a U.S.-built network intrusion detection appliance and is looking for Canadian resellers.
NetWorth Security Services announced at last week’s InfoSecurity Canada conference in the city that it
is the master distributor here for V-Secure Technologies’ IPS Network Appliances.
“We’re so sold on this I’ve reorganized the company around the ability to take to market the V-Secure solution,” said Dick White, NetWorth’s CEO.
That included dropping some anti-spam applications the company had been reselling and spinning off its mainframe security practice.
NetWorth is a small company – five employees with revenues last year of $1 million – but it White believes it can market V-Secure here.
V-Secure builds three versions of its appliances, which start at $US15,000 for the V-10 model that has 10MB per second of throughput, the V-100 with 100MBps of throughput and the V-1000 with 1GBps throughput. The unit sits between a router and the firewall.
Using what the company calls adaptive filtering, the appliances can protect against denial of service, distributed denial of service, brute force, dictionary attacks as well as pre-attack probes and worm propagation.
Among the reasons NetWorth picked V-Secure, White said, are the product’s ease of use and installation, and reports that over the last three years no customers have discovered false positives in data screened.
“We wanted ease of use because I didn’t want to hire a lot of staff to support it,” White said.
“Our go-to-market plan is to take this to resellers and they will not have to require special skill sets.”
Another factor is that V-Secure is based in New Jersey. “When dealing with security it’s imperative you communicate with people on a timely basis,” said White. NetWorth once had a West coast partner, and because of the time difference “I wouldn’t do it again,’ he said.
He’s looking for five VARs across the country, small to mid-size companies with a security focus. Resellers have a choice of two levels in the partner program: Standard partners commit to selling under US$1 million of product a year, while premier partners promise to sell more than US$1 million. White said those goals could be adjusted with V-Secure if they’re unreasonable.
Premium partners will get a 10 per cent cut in the price of product below the price standard resellers pay.
NetWorth vice-president Phil Frampton spent time at the trade show looking hoping VARs would come by the company’s booth, but he wasn’t the only vendor trolling for resellers.
Standing in front of a huge tractor-trailer Crossbeam Systems uses to show its security services switches, Paul Condon, the company’s vice-president of sales for the Americas said it would like to add several more resellers to its Canadian stable.
The turnkey solutions made by the Concord, Mass., company are sold to enterprises, carriers and service providers.
Luc Gervais and Karen Letain, partners behind Channel Management International of Montreal, were working the booths for two of the U.S. companies they represent here, PatchLink and SecureWave.
“We act as extensions of a company’s sales force,” explained Letain, creating Canadian sales and marketing plans. They represent eight vendors and 15 resellers.
VARs should note they’re looking in particular for resellers on the East and West coast.
Meanwhile Nayan Ruparelia of British-based Nayiak, a Linux firewall and Web server manufacturer, was looking for a distributor as well as resellers on his first trip to Canada.
The company’s NFW111L firewall for 500 users, which was launched the same week, would sell for about $6,000, he said. Other models go as high as $15,000.
And for those looking ahead, Rick Tardif, sales director of Mazu Networks of Cambridge, Mass., which makes behaviour-based network security appliance, said his firm sells direct now, “but we’re aggressively adopting to a VAR environment.”
