Governance and risk compliance (GRC) vendor Iconium has named VAR Logicalis as its first UK Policy Enforcement Partner.

Logicalis was one of 11 standard UK Iconium resellers before being elevated to the new partner category, which Nigel Kilpatrick, sales and marketing director at Iconium, described as a kind of “super partnership”.

The accreditation will allow Logicalis to supply and support an integrated offering comprising Iconium’s Policy Manager Enforcer and Cisco’s Network Admission Control and Clean Access technology.

“Logicalis drove Iconium and Cisco to integrate,” Kilpatrick said. “It understands that customers have a need to link GRC with the infrastructure.”

The announcement follows a period of considerable churn in UK-based Iconium’s channel strategy.

“When we started, we tried to go after the information security channel,” Kilpatrick said. “I came on board in 2005 and changed all that because we need a higher level of sophistication when talking to executives such as the head of risk.”

He added that Iconium now works only with tier-one or tier-two system integrators, including Thales and 2e2.

Meanwhile, Robert Pijselman, chief executive of Netherlands-based GRC vendor BWise, said he is preparing to launch a UK office in 2007.

“The challenge with our technology is that we sell to the chief financial officer, not the IT manager,” he said. “I haven’t run into any VARs that play in this space.”

Logicalis claims acquisition will strengthen IBM and HP relationships