Riverbed gets Hammer to crack the SME sector
Appointment of a third distributor leads to questions from existing incumbent partners
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.”