Aventail signs three more partners

SSL VPN vendor Aventail has signed two resellers in Australia, a distributor in New Zealand and expects to announce more Australasian partnerships shortly.

Andrew Draper, regional sales manager for Aventail in Australasia, said the US-based vendor had signed Sydney-based resellers Seccom Networks and VoIP and New Zealand distributor Renaissance Brands.

But he said that more reseller signings were likely, including a couple of companies in New Zealand.

Seccom had sold "a lot" of Fortinet gear previously, he said. Former partners of Fortinet were expected to be among future signings when Aventail in March outlined its channel expansion plans.

"Seccom is a very successful managed [service provider]," Draper said.

VoIP was strong in the carrier market and engineering base. "We see VoIP as a perfect partner for gaining access into the service provider and carrier space," Draper said.

At the time, Aventail had been talking to four potential distribution partners in Australia and two in New Zealand.

Draper said then that Aventail wanted someone in Perth and that the market had room for more resellers in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne.

Hosting partners to help bring SSL VPN as a managed service, global partners already working with Aventail overseas, and a local carrier could be signed, Draper said.

Aventail was also pushing a new reseller tradeback scheme that it believed would tempt customers to swap IPSec VPNs for SSL VPN – a technology which Aventail believed had recently overcome its disadvantages vis-a-vis IPSec.

"Anything up to about the value of $100,000, you can trade back through our reseller partners," Draper said.

Aventail's latest IPSec could now support VoIP through version 8.5 of the vendor's operating system. The updated operating system also had full smart tunnel access, adaptive access and bidirectional access control, he said.

"It provides granular bidirectional access control for all traffic. And, basically, the smart tunnelling offers access to all networking resources," Draper said. "[SSL VPN] traditionally couldn't support VoIP."