Westcon leaps into services with SMX deal

New Zealand-based email security services company SMX has signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Westcon Group in Australia, giving SMX access to Westcon's 2,000 plus nationwide resellers and providing Westcon a stepping stone into distributing hosted services.

Up until now, SMX anti-spam and anti-virus email filtering service was sold direct through the company's internal sales team and four or five different resellers in Australia, Jesse Ball, SMX managing director told CRN.

Now it will be offered by Westcon to existing resellers and new resellers interested in selling the service.

Ball said SMX has done "quite well in New Zealand, in particular in government and with Blue Chip customers."

He said Australia is a good opportunity because "there isn't a lot of competition".

Business processes are very similar in Australia to New Zealand he said. "Buying is very similar and a lot of those credentials can be transferred very easily to the Australian market.

"We built through our direct sales, proved there was a market and then signed resellers on. We've done that in New Zealand, but the time it would take us to do that in Australia was too slow for us - Australia is a big place.

"Westcon has great coverage and they're known as a specialist security distributor, which is aligned with what we do. And we want speed to market," he said.

Ball said Westcon is the only distributor "the company intends to work with" and the deal does not extend to Westcon in New Zealand at this stage.

With expansion in mind, SMX has appointed an ANZ sales manager based in New Zealand and intends to grow its local resources.

Westcon Group's Australian managing director, Leigh Howard said the deal was "the first time that Westcon is distributing a cloud-based service."

"Strategically, the time is right to start distributing SaaS services here in Australia. Logically email is a good place to start and SMX is a good fit for us and our resellers."

Westcon will provide a dedicated sales resource to train Westcon resellers and directly assist with provisioning new customers.

SMX will assist resellers with a highly streamlined provisioning process which will enable resellers to have their customers up and running within hours.

"This is a major step forward in ridding corporate networks of spam and viruses in a single stroke - with the savings in bandwidth and lost productivity more than covering the service charges," Howard said.

The service will be hosted in Australia by SMX at its co-located Melbourne data centre which opened in November.

Jesse Ball, SMX managing director told CRN that more data centres deals are coming in the "next couple of months".