Netintelligence goes indirect

Bill Strain: The SME market will benefit from SaaS because it frees up customers' IT staff.

Internet security firm Netintelligence is targeting the SME software-as-a-service (SaaS) market to coincide with its indirect channel expansion.

The direct-selling vendor eventually plans to generate all of its sales through the channel having unveiled a two-tier partner programme.

Bill Strain, managing director of Netintelligence, said: “SaaS is ideal for the SME market because it frees up the customer’s IT staff.

“It can be used as an add-on to managed services. Some 18 months ago this was an exotic idea, but it is rapidly becoming mainstream.”

Netintelligence’s SaaS-based managed service offerings include web filtering, mail filtering, internet security, monitoring and more recently, virtualisation. It plans to increase its portfolio over the coming months to include managed services such as business mail, ISP mail, virtual and dedicated servers.

Strain said resellers deliver the SaaS model over the internet, from either a reseller site or a Netintelligence site.
“SaaS has really taken off in the US, with the UK only owning a small chunk of the overall market. This will change and the UK market is growing at a rapid rate,” he added.

Bob Tarzey, service director at analyst Quocirca, said there is an increasing amount of companies looking to capitalise on the expanding cloud computing market.

“Companies are moving into the SaaS SME market around web and email filtering at the moment and offering it online is not a new thing,” he said.

“However, in the past other companies have not worked well with the channel because a lot sell direct as well as indirect. It depends on Netintelligence’s channel model and if it plans to give the channel revenue share, this would be difficult.”