Blue Coat: resellers need to secure and accelerate businesses

The April merger between the two organisations increased Blue Coat’s reseller numbers from 1000 to 2500, said Matthew Young, vice president at Blue Coat. “There’s also an additional 50 employees to be added to the sales team, which means more staff in Australia,” he said.

“We need to jump on this as quickly as possible and hit the ground running in the region. The merger between the two companies is a lot easier because we have retained 99 percent of the staff in Australia,” said Young.

Wayne Neich, country manager of Blue Coat Australia/New Zealand, told CRN that both vendors’ channel partners are already being trained up to sell Packateer products. He said one of the key messages the vendor wants to send out to the mixed bag of channel partners is that they “should be securing and accelerating businesses”.

“There are WAN acceleration vendors out in the market that don’t have a security product. The majority of them will partner with a security vendor and suggest their products when end users ask about security. Customers don’t want that, they want product to do both,” said Neich.

Matthew Young, vice president at Blue Coat, said that is why the vendor is telling its channel that they cannot sell one product without the other. The vendor will also be assessing its distributors and finding out what each can offer both companies.

“While there’s no scheduled date for assessment, it would be silly of us not to assess the full capabilities of our distributor relationships. Between Blue Coat and Packateer we have four distributors; Express Data – which looks after Packaterr; Westcon – which looks after both; Firewall Systems – which takes care of Blue Coat; and Computerlinx (which also looks after both organisations,” said Neich.

The rationale behind Blue Coat choosing Westcon was for its focus on networking and Firewall Systems for security. “We need to find out from the distributors what they can do for a combined Blue Coat/Packateer before we make any assessments,” said Neich.