Paessler AG, the network monitoring company, puts its success in New Zealand down to two primary components: good partners and roadshows.
Soft Solutions is Paessler's sole distributor in New Zealand, and they are proving to be quite successful, says Andrew Timms, Paessler AG senior sales manager APAC.
"The distributor has good links into the ANZ industry and market - they have a good reach to other resellers and partners," says Timms.
The company also deals with a lot of MSPs and can reach those customers, which is a large target audience for Paessler.
“Soft Solutions is growing in terms of market share and reputation, and our product sits well in their catalogue,” Timms says.
Paessler's strategy is to work closely with distributors and they remain open to bringing more on board.
“Soft Solutions is performing well but they are by no means exclusive. We would bring on more distributors if we believed they would add business,” he says.
Last year Paessler had a short roadshow tour of three cities in New Zealand: Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington, and also had a number of small conferences.
This year, the team is planning to do two more sets of roadshows in New Zealand, one in Q2 and one in Q4.
Timms says the Paessler roadshows were very effective, proving to grow brand recognition and raise awareness for both customers and resellers.
“Attendees learned of the ways they can take the software on, and at the end of the day Paessler closed a lot of business with resellers and managed service providers.
It was extremely popular with managed service providers, he says, and was also popular with SMEs as the product ‘works well for this market'.
The roadshow showed people the product, how it works, how it can be applied to different settings and more, says TImms.
“The Paessler team could respond one-on-one, which was very valuable. Potential customers could ask detailed questions about a particular topic and can get an answer on the spot,” he says.
This face to face presence is important for both customers and channel partners, says Timms. He says with a bigger team in Australia, the company has the ability to visit partners more frequently.
“The more time we spend with our partners, the more aware they are of our product, of what it can do, and they can work on our behalf,” he says.
Paessler's primary goals for the year is to educate the channel, build stronger relationships with MSPs, increase their footprint in New Zealand and raise awareness of the product with customers.
In order to do this, Paessler is putting more resources into marketing, and is working on increasing their output of information about PRTG, Paessler's network monitoring software - including a lot of general information about the monitoring product.
For instance, Timms says customers are very interested in learning about what they can monitor and have a lot of interest in cloud services, so Paessler is releasing white papers on topics such as how customers can monitor physical and virtual infrastructure.
“In New Zealand people are well educated in terms of IT, but they don't understand is what our product can do for them," Timms says.
“New Zealand is very easy to deal with and open to ideas, they're willing to ask questions and bring on new products, even if they have a solution in place they will still talk to us to see if there's a way they can provide better solutions. They're quite pioneering and we're excited to grow here," he says.