Infotronics founder launches venture

The Australian virtualisation industry was today given a jumpstart with the launch of a distie focused on the technology.

TrackitOnline, founded by former owner of virtualisation distie Infotronics Phil Lancaster (pictured), counted US vendors such as PHD Virtual,  Kaviza and Liquidware Labs on its roster.

Lancaster sold Infotronics to businessman Peter Mavridis, whose S Central group failed last year amid recriminations and unpaid bills including workers' entitlements.

Lancaster was not involved in the business's failure; he left the company a few months before its demise.

But relationships with Infotronics' former vendor and reseller partners encouraged ManageEngine, ToutVirtual and Reptify to again sign with him under the new marquee.

"We've got a number of vendors that we had from our previous involvement and quite a few new people on our list," Lancaster told CRN.

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The Melbourne business of three staff distributes tools to manage virtual environments.

Lancaster, who had flagged his intention to launch the company with CRN last November said today's start was flawless.

"Really, over the Christmas break we were literally finalising a number of the contacts and over the last few weeks we've actually signed the ink, even though we officially started to doing the work before Christmas," Lancaster said.

"It's certainly come together well."

Channel program

He said that over the next six months the distie's priority was to help vendors establish themselves in Australia and assemble sales and marketing plans. "We're going to be announcing channel partner programs from sales training online right through to [vendor supplied programs] such as Liquidware Labs, who have a complete enabling program for consulting in a virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI)"

It already has resellers on its books: "All the majors, the likes of Dimension Data and Datacom and what I call your more tier 1, tier 2 integrators [have signed]," he said.

And it has "quite a large a number of smaller" reseller partners, he said.

Products such as PHD Virtual are quite "broadly appealing to anyone doing virtualisation"m he said but Liquidware Labs would be targeted to VDI assessment tool specialists.

"We're looking into people that are looking at management tools or something that's going to improve their backups or how they manage.

"We'll be strongest in doing effective BDI deployments.

"We're working on a number of areas where we engage and add value to the partners. We're creating marketing tools that we're looking at rolling out to the channel so that's something that we see as very important," he said.