Aastra signs WhiteGold in Australia

Aastra has appointed WhiteGold to distribute its telecommunications products and solutions in Australia.

Overseeing the relationship would be Aastra's incoming channel boss James Lockett, an industry veteran with 20 years' experience working for the likes of Telstra, Ericsson, NEC and Phoneware. 

WhiteGold would distribute Aastra’s range of SIP telephones, IP phones for Microsoft’s unified communications platform Lync and videoconferencing and VoIP solutions for SMBs.

“WhiteGold has a very strong, dynamic and growing business with an expanding channel network,” said Aastra A/NZ sales and marketing director Tony Warhurst.

“Adding the comprehensive voice-unified communication solution from Aastra to their extensive product range will help both parties expand their reseller partners and extend an extremely strong working relationship with both resellers and customers.”

WhiteGold distributed products spanning security, networking, VoIP and storage to a network of around 1200 resellers.

Managing director Dominic Whitehand said Aastra was an important addition to WhiteGold’s stable of vendors given Aastra's footprint in Australia and track record with open standards technology.

“Given Aastra’s history in being instrumental in the development of the SIP open standard, as well as the fact that they have grown both organically and through acquisition (most notably the acquisition of Ericsson’s technology in this space) – we feel that we have chosen well and will be positioned for success,” Whitehand said.

“This is an approach that we take whenever possible, to ensure that our channel is enabled with the best available technologies and services with which to service their end user customers.” 

Whitehand said that Aastra’s range of SIP phones optimised for Microsoft Lync Server 2010 would play an important role in helping WhiteGold extend its business in the unified communications space.

The networking vendor’s videoconferencing technology and VoIP solutions for SMBs also presented opportunities, he said.