In a unique bid to sell more training, Australian-based company RED Education works with Distribution Central to offer training through resellers, allowing partners to make margin on each sale.

Now partially-owned by Distribution Central, RED Education started four years ago by offering F5 training with two employees. The company now has 20 employees, offers training and certification from nine vendors and has a presence in Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia.

Sales Director Rob Howard said that RED Education sells training through Distribution Central and other distributors to resellers in order to allow integrators to “provide a holistic solution to the end user, and maintain account control rather than have their end user customer going off to a third party for training”.

While Howard said that margins aren’t massive, he emphasised that partners could add the training to solutions they sell to customers, or as part of a bundle package, which has proven to popular with resellers in New Zealand. Howard said, “We’re selling training every day through resellers in New Zealand.”

But the company is eager to expand its presence in New Zealand, and is running a promotion with Fortinet where if a partner attends one course, the second engineer pays half price and both attendees receive a free exam voucher.

“We’re running promotions like that from time to time to boost the number of certified people in the channel for our vendors,” Howard said.

For more information on the Fortinet deal, visit the RED site.

Commenting on the outlook for 2010, Howard said, “Most of the vendors that we deal with expect their business to double within Australia and New Zealand during the course of this year,” which he hopes will lead to promising growth in the coming year.

RED Education training vendors include: Aruba Networks, BlueCoat, Crossbeam Systems, Infoblox, F5 Networks, Fortinet, InfoAware, ITIL and Riverbed.