Astaro Partners with SoftGen

To broaden its reach into the local market, UTM vendor, Astaro, has appointed SoftGen as a sub-distributor.

The vendor has also extended it relationship with Techplus, which will now distribute Astaro products into the New Zealand market. Recently appointed SoftGen general manager, Guy Coles said the distributor had plans to broaden the scope of products SoftGen offers to the market.

“We’ve got a number of facets that we’re going down and certainly the security space is a significant one,” he said. “We have no plans to dilute our commitment to the distribution or development channel – it’s been our core competency for a long time.”

Coles said he was looking to add partners that had a technical understanding and were able to articulate business value to their customers.

He highlighted strong services revenues up for grabs for partners.

“People that have a good security understanding are certainly partners that we would like to talk to,” he said. “We plan on making Astaro an extremely valuable proposition to the channel because of the income that can be generated from selling the product.”

Astaro Asia-Pacific and Japan vice-president of sales, Bryan Stibbard, said SoftGen’s focus on expanding its business and focus on security fitted in well.

“We’ve really geared up now and SoftGen will be promoting us into the NSW market place fairly heavily as well as nationally,” he said. “When we first met up it wasn’t the quantity of partners that were important to me, it was the quality and their business drive.”

Astaro has about 40 partners on-board and will run a recruitment campaign to target specific partners for its email and Web gateway products. Partners get access to Astaro’s online portal with quoting at list pricing as well as marketing campaigns.

“We’ve been growing very aggressively quarter-on-quarter and we’re bucking a lot of the market trends,” Stibbard said.