Sourcefire recruits Caretower to blaze trail into SMBs

London-based reseller first of new breed of partner to come on board for Sourcefire's IPSx offering

Intrusion prevention vendor Sourcefire has unveiled Caretower as the first UK recruit for its new SMB offering, IPSx.

Launched in April, IPSx is targeted at allowing more transactional resellers outside Sourcefire's traditional base of enterprise-focused partners to address sub-$100,000 (£62,000) opportunities.

Half a dozen partners across EMEA have already come on board, with Caretower the first UK recruit.

Anthony Perridge, EMEA channel director at Sourcefire , said the London-based reseller won its first IPSx deal earlier this month.

"Caretower has historically been good at selling anti-virus and lower-value, higher-volume products and IPSx is bang on with where it plays," he said.

"Historically, we have been associated with best-of-breed, highly configurable IPS for enterprise organisations. We want to move down the stack and serve people who are interested in plug and protect and who do not want to spend time configuring security appliances. For that we need a different type of channel from the Vistorms, Integralises and Verizons."

Perridge confirmed that Sourcefire would move into the firewall space, but is holding off its grand entrance until next year.

"We want to move into this space from a position of strength so initially we will build application control into our IPS," he said.

Sourcefire added Avnet as its first UK distributor last year and Perridge said the vendor was now of a size that it requires a pan-European distribution alliance.

"We are dealing with global SIs that are going to be demanding from us some kind of pan-EMEA or pan-global distributor and will go out to tender next year," he said. "Avnet, Computerlinks and Westcon are probably the main suspects."