Wick Hill hits Kaspersky top spot

Kilpatrick: We have paid a reasonable whack of money for this

Wick Hill has become Kaspersky Lab’s largest UK distributor after snapping up C-Media’s business with the anti-virus vendor.

The acquisition will see Kaspersky’s roster of corporate distributors shrink from four to three and will thrust Wick Hill ahead of Arc Technology in terms of market share.

Under the terms of the deal, Kaspersky dealers that bought from C-Media ­ which is better known as CM-I Labs ­ will now be transferred to Wick Hill.

Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick estimated that this would give his firm access to more than 200 new dealers.

“We have paid a reasonable whack of money for this,” he said. “There is a big opportunity for us to grow our Kaspersky business and give it more scale.”

The deal was sanctioned by Kaspersky, and UK and Ireland managing director Malcolm Tuck revealed the vendor has no plans to move back up to four distributors.

“We have to ensure the targets for acquiring new partners are maintained with three distributors instead of four,” he said. “But we are not looking at adding any more distributors to the mix.”

Meanwhile, CM-I stressed the sale was part of its strategy to offload vendors once they have reached a certain level of maturity.

CM-I chairman Stuart Tidy said: “We get a product to a certain level, then we sell it to a broadliner. In this case, we had an offer we couldn’t refuse. We do not want to sell CM-I, because it has a good name and we are interested in taking on more products.”

Stuart Reay, managing director of Arc, said: “This sends a statement that having strong VADs is the way Kaspersky wants to do business.”