Alcatel distributor adds security appliances

Voice-and-data distributor VExpress has won an exclusive deal to on-sell an Australian-made range of network security appliances.

Margaret Brigdale, GM at VExpress, said the distributor -- which until now had been known mainly as an Alcatel reseller -- had signed an annually-renewable deal with new Australian vendor Cliksafe.

The deal is exclusive and gives VExpress the right to market Cliksafe's entire range, she said.

Brigdale said the initial offering was Cliksafe Messenger, a small rack-mountable email security appliance that offers anti-virus and anti-spam to 25 to 200 users at the client or server.

'For us, the main reason was to look at some anti-spam devices. That email security is at the forefront of everybody's mind in a lot of businesses,' she said.

VExpress' resellers had also been asking about potential security offerings, Brigdale said, which she believed was one of the areas of greatest IT demand. 'In the next couple of years, I would certainly like to have a piece of that growth,' she said.

VExpress, a self-styled 'boutique' IT distributor, was established in May 2003, primarily to distribute Alcatel voice hardware, third-party accessories for that hardware and services. The new signing was part of the distributor's increased diversification, into data in particular, Brigdale said.

'It has been my job to come in and get things up and running and we'll certainly be looking at bringing other data products on,' she said. 

Cliksafe Messenger offers three 10/100 Ethernet ports, web-browser-based configuration, automatic updating, auditing and reporting. It is advertised as able to scan, tag or quarantine incoming and outgoing email, restrict attachments and remove suspect scripting such as Java applets or ActiveX objects.

RRP is $3955 for 25 users.

'It's easy to deploy. Resellers can just go into a customer site, put it in and everything just happens,' Brigdale said. 'With this, you stick it on the network and the network administrator doesn't need to put [and maintain] software on all the PCs.'