Netgear eyes up mid-market gap

Netgear appeals to partner base to help it exploit overlooked horizontal

Perfect fit: Netgear claims its new-look product portfolio will allow it to make inroads into the mid-market

Netgear has accused rival networking vendors of vacating the mid-market and has called on the channel to help it fill the void.

Shane Buckley, general manager of Netgear’s SMB unit, said the vendor has spent the past year developing an enterprise-class product portfolio. He added that rival vendors’ retrenchment had left a gap in the market.

“During the global financial crisis, some of the more traditional large enterprise vendors retreated, focusing on the datacentre requirements of the Fortune 1000 companies,” he said.

The vendor’s UK channel sales team has been almost doubled to 19 since the start of the year. Netgear has also teamed up with third-party services outfit NetCrowd to offer a white-label engineering package.

UK and Ireland VAR manager Neill Hammond said: “It works for small resellers that want to punch above their weight.”

Two new tiers – Platinum and Platinum Plus – have been added to Netgear’s Powershift channel programme. Additional discounts of eight and 12 per cent are being offered in return for expectations of technical expertise on higher-end products.

The vendor’s near-term focus will be on deepening and expanding relationships with existing channel partners, claimed Buckley.

“This is not really about [wide-scale recruitment],” he said. “We have partners that we can develop incrementally and we can work with the large integrators in a more strategic way.”

In the UK, the vertical focus will be on healthcare and education, markets where Buckley said the “affordability of Netgear solutions is powerful”.

Keith Humphreys, managing consultant at analyst euroLAN, said: “Cost-conscious organisations will have to look at [Netgear]. But it is a market that is really over-subscribed.”