Networking vendor gears up for Kiwi growth

NetGear has set its sights on Kiwi growth, with aggressive plans for channel expansion and the appointment of a new New Zealand territory manager.

Brad Little, NetGear ANZ managing director, says he's keen to see the networking company double its local active reseller count as it pushes into new verticals.

"We've made a lot of investment in the last six months into New Zealand in awareness with roadshows, web and live training. We've invested more in the last 12 months with awareness, events and outreach to our networks than we have in the previous two years.

Carla Davey – previously with Dove Electronics and D-Link – stepped into the role of Netgear's New Zealand territory manager late last year, charged with driving the brand and strategy locally.

Davey says she'll be working to help resellers understand how technology can help grow their business and working with them collaboratively 'to get across more opportunities'.

Little says the company is focusing on three key verticals – Wi-Fi deployment across education, aged care facilities and others with 100-150 users requiring simple Internet access; disaster recovery and business continuity; and surveillance.

"There are a lot of new verticals and solution opportunities that constantly evolve, be it through a hybrid cloud solution, more and more surveillance cameras going from analogue to IP, more and more schools and aged care centres needing to provide Wi-Fi access to each and every room," Little says.

 "We have a good network of existing VARs but we also realise that with these new solutions and opportunities we still need to recruit new VARs to reach into these areas and to give us more coverage across New Zealand," he adds.

"We are looking to expand and we're looking for people to take us into these vertical markets and partner with us on plenty of new opportunities, be it vertical or product based.

Little says he expects Netgear to double its Kiwi active reseller base to around 1800 by 2016.

The networking company partnered with StorageCraft last year to provide ReadyRecover, an extension to StorageCraft's offering which sees Netgear's ReadyData unified storage become the complete backup target.

"That's right now in the channel for us there is a lot of excitement and buzz. It's probably our key focus over the last few months and has been very successful," says Little.

"It's one area where we can really bring that top end of town, enterprise-grade technology and smarts and position it well to small to medium businesses – the greater masses.

Little says ReadyData is proving a popular offering for NetGear in New Zealand.

"But the core of our business is still our switching portfolio. It's our entry level managed switches, we're doing particularly well with our 10gigabit switches, as a single unit they're going through more growth than anything.

On the surveillance front, Little says New Zealand still has a lot of analogue systems which need to go IP.

"Right now, traditionally, those analogue solutions aren't installed, distributed or resold by IT resellers," he says.