Riverbed gets Hammer to crack the SME sector

WAN optimisation vendor Riverbed Technology has appointed Hammer as its third UK distributor, but the move was met with a stony reception from existing ally Zycko.

Hammer is charged with increasing Riverbed’s penetration of the SME sector and will include the vendor’s appliances in its storage virtualisation line-up.

Richard Brown, director of EMEA channels at Riverbed, said: “This agreement gives us access to VARs that sell complementary technology.

“We did huge due diligence on this and there is minimal overlap with our other distributors: Zycko focuses on emerging storage technologies and DNS goes after high-end accounts.”

However, David Galton-Fenzi, group sales director at Zycko, said: “Riverbed is one of our strategically hottest products and we expect to grow sales with the vendor 10-fold in 2007. I would suggest that two distributors is enough to run any region. It gives VARs the choice they require.”

Paul Higginbottom, solutions manager at Hammer, said the distributor had a list of 50 VARs it would target as part of the deal.

Marcus Chambers, vice-president of sales for EMEA at Riverbed, said the firm is building a loyalty programme to encourage partners to invest more mindshare in the vendor.

“Our partners have gone from Riverbed being a product in their portfolio to being a top-four product. Many are at a size where they want to pay for demo equipment,” he said.

Chambers claimed that Riverbed was winning nine out of 10 “formal product evaluations” and “was giving a lot of pain” to competitors. “I’m very pleased our market share growth has been organic,” he said. “Our rivals have been around a lot longer than us, but our footprint is larger.”

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