Astaro Grows Channel 300% in Australia and New Zealand Over Last Six Months

Sydney, Australia – Astaro Corporation (www.astaro.com), a leading vendor of security appliances, today announced the addition of three new partners to its reseller channel. In-tellect, SoftGen, and TechPlus in Australia and New Zealand have partnered with Astaro to deliver its award-winning line of Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances to customers in the region. The new partnerships will help to expand Astaro’s reach and service offerings. Since arriving in the local market six months ago, Astaro’s ANZ channel has experienced rapid growth, with the addition of over 30 partners to its reseller network.

“Our strategic partnerships have allowed Astaro to fully realise ANZ’s tremendous market potential, and has positioned us to capitalise from it,” says Bryan Stibbard, Vice President of Sales for Asia Pacific and Japan at Astaro. “Partnering with In-tellect, SoftGen and TechPlus gave us the ability to further expand our reach in Australia and New Zealand and provide our customers with the highest level of quality and service.”

According to IDC, the Australia and New Zealand security solutions market reached over US$1 billion in 2007 and the market is set to continue to grow at a CAGR of 11.8% to reach over US$2 billion by 2012.*

Under the agreement, In-tellect will offer Astaro’s full line UTM products to organisations across Australia. Gary Lowe, managing director at In-tellect comments, “Astaro’s security and web gateway products provide comprehensive protection to businesses of all sizes, while offering the merits of being easy to deploy and manage through an all-in-one approach. We are keen to bring these advanced technologies to our customers and fulfil their changing requirements in security.” SoftGen will deliver Astaro’s products via its extensive partner network throughout Australia. Guy Coles, general manager of SoftGen says, “We continuously seek out groundbreaking technologies to cater the needs of our corporate users. Astaro’s UTM solutions offer the best of their kind in the security market, and we are excited to forge this new partnership to drive mutual business growth.”

To cover the New Zealand market, TechPlus was appointed as distributor to sell and support Astaro’s solutions through its local channel network. According to Paul Kern, managing director at TechPlus, the demand of security is on the rise among businesses.

“We are looking forward to strengthening the current partnership with Astaro and include support for our New Zealand customers, protecting them from the rising tide of viruses, spam malicious attacks that aim to infiltrate corporate networks.”

About Astaro

Astaro offers the most complete and easy to use Internet security appliances available. Combining best of breed applications, the proven quality of Linux and enterprise level performance, Astaro’s award-winning products provide the latest protection with the best total cost of ownership. Software, hardware and virtual appliance offerings provide users the flexibility to meet a wide variety of deployment scenarios. Distributed by a growing worldwide network of more than 2,500 resellers, Astaro products protect over 35,000 businesses in 60 countries. Astaro, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA and Karlsruhe, Germany, offers free downloads of its products at www.astaro.com. About In-tellect In-tellect is a long established information technology company whose services portfolio spans strategy development, system integration, project management and the specialist technical areas of data communications, remote access solutions and IT security, supported by solutions that are customer driven while having broad market appeal and application. The company service a substantial customer base of national companies that operate across many sectors including government, retail, wholesale, logistics, transport, manufacturing, distribution, mining, construction, education, legal and accounting. In-tellect also offers a complete end-to-end service to small to medium businesses. For more information, please visit www.in-tellect.com.au.

About SoftGen

Established in 1991, SoftGen distributes business software solutions to a large number of channel partners throughout Australia and New Zealand, provides support for these products and is an investor in selected software solution applications. Since its launch, the business has been growing continuously and now has a presence throughout Australia. SoftGen has built a reseller and business partner network over more than a decade of operation, and is particularly strong in banking relationships. The company owns its operating premises and has been financially stable throughout its lengthy period of operation. For more information, please visit http://www.sgen.com.au.

About TechPlus

TechPlus Distribution was established to provide value added distribution of niche products to the Australasian IT channel. The company is a recognised leader in the Bandwidth Management / Quality of Service (QoS) field with product offerings from a number of vendors to span the market from SME all the way through to Telco grade. More recently TechPlus has extended the offerings to include Security and low-cost, high-functionality anti-virus solutions to draw a broader appeal to the channel and the OEM & System Builder customers. For more information, please visit www.techplus.com.au.