Allot urges VARs to take another look

New northern European sales VP vows to increase "personal visibility" within the channel

The channel has an outdated view of intelligent bandwidth vendor Allot Communications that needs to be updated, according to its UK distributor Wick Hill.

The NASDAQ-listed vendor has widened its portfolio through acquisition in recent years but Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick said some VARs still wrongly view it as a point product vendor.

Kilpatrick's comments come after Allot enlisted channel veteran Graeme Verroken as vice president of northern European sales.

Allot draws the majority of sales from mobile operators - it recently bagged a $5m deal with an unnamed European carrier - but Kilpatrick said the vendor's enlarged range of security, analytics and video caching products are now just as relevant in the enterprise space.

"Some of the old views of Allot need to be upgraded," Kilpatrick said.

"With the additions to the portfolio we need to go out there, bring new partners on and get the new message to market. It's not the same company people looked at five or ten years ago."

Kilpatrick said the Allot of old focused on solving one or two issues around quality of service, bandwidth or application control. "It's now quality of user experience that is the important element," he explained.

Allot currently has about 3,000 enterprise clients globally and about 40 active UK partners. Wick Hill hopes to add another 10-15 partners serving organisations with a "richness of digitial activity", including banks and universities.

Verroken, who has previously worked for IBM and C&W, said Allot's local team had almost doubled to nine in recent months and vowed to increase its profile in the channel.

"What was lacking was that personal visibility to the channel, which I am able to bring to the table because of my background in the industry," he said.