DNS Arrow hits targets with revamped line-up

James Pattinson: We are uniquely positioned to drive security into virtualisation and storage

DNS Arrow has come out fighting after the loss of its Websense contract, unveiling a major investment into its security arm with new staff and vendor signings.

Over the past three months, the distributor has boosted its security team’s headcount to 25, poaching three staff from rival Bell Micro and two from vendor Sophos.

Meanwhile, DNS Arrow has unveiled anti-virus specialist Kaspersky as the latest addition to its vendor stable, following on from its recent signings of Proofpoint and Sandisk.

The security offensive comes shortly after Websense confirmed it had axed DNS Arrow from its distribution line-up following a review (Channelweb, 24 October).
James Pattinson, security director at DNS Arrow, said the additions represent a major commitment by DNS Arrow to its security business.

“We have increased the resources in line with the growth of our security business over the past 12 months,” he explained.

“October will be 47 per cent up on last year and we will hopefully continue to grow at the rate we have enjoyed this year,” he said.

Despite admitting DNS Arrow was Websense’s second-largest UK distributor behind Computerlinks, Pattinson claimed the firm had sufficient coverage of the content filtering space without the giant on board.

Pattinson revealed that virtualisation security will be a big push area for the distributor over the coming year as more storage resellers look to provide a security component to datacentre deployments.

“Datacentre consolidation using technologies such as VMware and Citrix presents a bunch of security issues, and we have the skills to address those issues,” he said.
“This will mean extending our value-add in security and encouraging that into virtualisation and storage resellers. DNS Arrow is uniquely positioned to do this because no other distributor covers security, virtualisation and storage.”

Pattinson said DNS Arrow would also offer an alternative to rival distributors by combining best-of-breed vendors into single solution areas, such as securing data in motion.

Dave Ellis, online security director at Computerlinks, was unconvinced by DNS Arrow’s rhetoric, claiming the loss of Websense would be a major blow for his rival.

“There is no doubt this will be a big loss to DNS Arrow, as it was the sole distributor for SurfControl before it was bought by Websense,” he said. “To try to play this down would be foolish.

“A lot of Kaspersky’s business in the enterprise market is OEM, so its coverage compared to, say, Trend Micro is small,” Ellis added.