Netgear CEO: Australia is our star performer

Patrick Lo, CEO and chairman of Netgear, joined CRN whilst on his whistlestop tour of A/NZ and made some bullish claims against its nearest rivals.

“We are better than anybody else in the SMB space,” claimed Lo. “If you look at our usual competitors: Linksys, D-Link, 3-Com and HP, nobody has that broad range of offerings spanning from switches, to routers, to firewalls, to wireless LAN switching, to NAS. We have the most complete offering today.”

Lo was equally upbeat about Netgear’s progress in the local market. “Australia is our best performing country in the world, bar none,” he said. “This is in terms of per head of population, in terms of market share, in terms of our market awareness, and our relationship with the channel.

“We formed our Australian presence very early after we established in 1996. As we are an American firm it is easier for us to pick the right partners. We speak the same language and we think alike. The Australian market is easier for us to figure out.”

In terms of partner focus moving forward, Lo indentified two key areas for partners over the next 12 months.

“We feel there is a lot of opportunity out there for the Australian value-add resellers. The first technology to push to end-users is NAS, because data is the most important asset of any business and you cannot afford to lose that asset,” said Lo. “The second opportunity for partners is for them to push the gigabyte smart switches as the world is dealing with more multimedia files.”

For the complete Q&A with Lo and Ryan Parker, managing director of Netgear A/NZ, check out Issue 246 of CRN Magazine – out Monday 9th June.