The man responsible for launching SonicWALL in the UK has bounced back into the channel with a new security distributor.

Ray Binnion launched Defend-IT in March and has signed visibility and network access control (NAC) software specialist Insightix as its first vendor.

Binnion, Defend-IT's non-executive director, oversaw SonicWALL's UK channel launch in 1996 while at distributor Tekdata ­ which he founded in 1969. Binnion left Tekdata in 1999 and has spent recent years working for US-based vendors.

Binnion said:“Insightix has echoes of SonicWALL. No one was interested in SonicWALL at the time and now you cannot imagine the market without it. I am pretty sure Insightix is going to be big.”

James Colby, vice president of marketing at Insightix, claimed the vendor's focus on visibility gives it an edge over established NAC vendors such as Juniper and Cisco.

"There are a lot of NAC products out there but most do not do the job properly,”he said.

"When we install our network visibility platform we typically find that 20 to 50 per cent of additional elements are connected to an enterprise network. If you do not know something is there you cannot protect against it,”he explained.

Binnion said Insightix's software is currently being evaluated by a number of UK education and local government organisations.

"Once we have proved we understand the market we will start to increase resources,” he explained.

Binnion added that Defend-IT would not take on any more vendors until it had seeded the market for Insightix.