EfficientIP looking for UK channel growth

Security player EfficientIP is ramping up its channel, building on its recent decision to work with a major distributor, as it looks for more growth through partners.

Last month, the vendor, which specialises in DNS, DHCP and IP address management (DDI) security, signed up Westcon-Comstor to handle its products across Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific.

The vendor has already seen the distributor grow its business, and John Hughes, regional director for the UK, Ireland and Nordics at EfficientIP, is keen for that trend to continue.

“We’ve recently brought on board Westcon as our sole distributor at that pan-European level. We can utilise its size and reach, and its knowledge will be massively beneficial for us. We’re looking to recruit and onboard new partners,” he said.

Hughes added that the firm had made a commitment to be 100% channel and now was a good time for partners to sign up with the business because it was making investments to support that aim.

“We have seen massive growth since we released our new partner programme late last year,” he said. “What we’re looking to do now is keep that expansion into my territory. We are the fastest growing DDI vendor, and looking to grow at the same level or increase that over the next few years, and the only way you can do that is through the channel.”

Hughes said the partner programme had shown the channel that it was serious about offering a “true partnership” and was prepared to support and reward those that backed the firm.

At the same time, customers are driving increased demand for tools that help them remain secure in a hybrid world, and partners have seen the uptick in business.

“We can help partners add value to their business, whether that’s through selling solutions, which we do, and then bolted on services at the back end, which is perfect for those partners... The second part from a reseller is to manage their service portfolio that they can plug us into, and that’s what we’re seeing in the channel,” said Hughes.

“DDI and DNS security... are complementary to a lot of what the channel already sells, whether it’s firewalls, endpoints, or their own managed services from an infrastructure perspective or endpoint perspective,” he added.

The momentum in the market is unlikely to change over the course of this year, with customers continuing to struggle with the challenges of hybrid and multicloud environments.

“Organisations are moving to hybrid environments [which makes it] trickier than ever to not only secure your network, but also to ensure that availability,” said Hughes. “[To] enable the customer to be able to manage this multicloud world we live in, and then when you add the ability to provide insights around DNS across all those environments, the ability to detect and prevent malicious behaviour, it just adds a multitude of value.”