Profile: Keith Glennan, CEO, Network Box

While some resellers did not quite understand the concept, Glennan found the most disturbing response was that some companies, rather than challenge the status quo, were more interested in getting as much money out of the prevailing business model as they possibly could.

"One of the most amazing responses was a large integrator that said, 'We know that what you’re doing with Network Box is where the market’s going to go. The problem is that clients are paying really good money for us to put point solutions in and then do the systems integration. Not only do we make margin on all the products we sell, but the ongoing management is a nightmare, the clients know it’s a nightmare because there are so many disparate platforms involved that they expect
it to be expensive'," he recalls the integrator saying.

"'If you come along with some much cheaper and ultimately a better solution it’s of no value to us because we make less money out of it'," the integrator said.

Glennan got this sort of attitude from all sorts of companies, ranging from suburban tier-two integrators right up to the largest Australian and international players.

When he actually pointed out to a couple of the companies that this was an incredibly short-sighted approach he was amazed by the response.

"A couple of them agreed it was short-sighted but said they’re going to make hay while the sun shines." One large company in particular is still holding that position because it has long-established relationships with big vendors.

To be fair, a disruptive technology like Network Box is a bit a mind shift for resellers and systems integrators that have worked with the best-of-breed model for almost a decade.

"Everyone who has been doing security has been brought up on the notion of individual vendors specialising in one thing. You get antivirus from one vendor, firewall from another, content filtering from another, and you get a systems integrator to make them all talk to each other," says Glennan.

To a large extent, this approach is just symptomatic of the way security threats have developed. Today’s security situation did not appear fully formed but started with boot viruses and as IT technology matured and became pervasive, the threats multiplied. Ironically, to sell companies on his
new baby, Glennan had to do what the channel hates most, sell Network Box direct.

Apart from the resistance of those resellers who wanted to maintain the status quo, Glennan found the initial response from the channel was ‘who are your clients?’

"Then we’d say, 'We’ve just started in Australia but we can tell you who our clients are overseas'," says Glennan.

"Pretty uniformly we were told, 'We’re not interested, and if we’re going to go and sell this to our local clients we need to know who’s doing it locally'. So we spent 12 months getting direct clients and we targeted high profile organisations like Toyota, BMW, Boise Cascade and Nintendo. A lot of them took a while to make a decision but we knew we needed to get a stable of big clients to give us credibility locally so that we could go back to the channel."