New kid on the block

"I see most resellers in this country work with a core, stable group of products," he says. "That is where a customer will look for a true solution provider to add value. There are a handful of prods not in everyone’s portfolio and I think we must be out there looking for new technologies that are actually fixing the pain."

For Buckley and his company Vantage GVT, those customers turn to it for products and services required for enterprise-grade audio and videoconferencing. And of late Buckley says they have been annoyed with their firewalls’ inability to cope with the amount of traffic generated by videoconferences, a bottleneck he thinks means good business.

This approach is fuelled by past experiences when Buckley imported technically elegant products that impressed customers but did not generate sales. "We imported a product from the UK. It was a great technology, however there was not enough pain for the customer to make them invest to solve it. It was a nice-to-have, but you cannot make a business out of those."

But customers’ worries about fi rewalls suggested a bigger and better opportunity. "Voice-over-IP generates 5Kb/s," he says.

"Videoconferencing is 400Kb/s. The firewall can’t handle it. But when you consider that VoIP will soon be a mission critical application, you can’t have the firewall being a bottleneck."

Buckley therefore looked for a product that could avoid firewall bottlenecks and found one from Crossbeam Systems, a company whose products combine firewalls and other networking appliances from other vendors to make them centrally manageable and improve performance. Crossbeam’s approach promised the firewall performance improvements Buckley desired, so he travelled to the company’s Boston headquarters to ‘ask them 100 questions’.

GVT's Buckley: Travels to the US once a year on the hunt for new products

"What you are really trying to assess is how they compete in the US market. How do they plan to grow their business, what is their marketopening strategy, what are their competitors and their revenues?" Exit strategy is another important factor, as Buckley believes a vendor must have a viable exit strategy if it is to succeed in the first place. This process lets Buckley assess whether or not it is worth becoming the vendor’s first or second reseller in Australia. "With or without us, I think Crossbeam will turn over five or 10 million [dollars] here in its first year.

"If you can get to that level of spending in the first year it is a viable business for one or two players. If it is only half a million or a [million dollars] it is not."

With the decision made to resell Crossbeam, Buckley says the rest follows easily. "We need to appoint a prod manager, someone to own the number and who can be a technical pre-sales person. He is the one that the sales guys can use to identify an opportunity and he has to qualify the opportunities. But you apply those resources only once supply agreements are in place. We’ll borrow resources from the vendor to do evaluations and then allocate our resources later. It is just part of that investment cycle."

And that cycle will see Buckley return to the US year after year, but his destination will likely be the offices of vendors he has already identified, rather than trade shows.

"The web is the main source of products, plus my personal network," he says. "We are trying to pick a market first, to solve a problem. If you can figure out what the customers’ pain is, you can look for a solution to that pain. And if you find the product that solves that first, you can make a business of it."