Wick Hill creates EMEA division and drops M&A hint
Security VAD signs Black Duck as opening vendor for 'Wick Hill Select' unit as it reveals it is in talks with EMEA targets
Wick Hill has unveiled Black Duck as the inaugural vendor for its new EMEA division as it hinted at plans to expand geographically through acquisition.
The launch of Wick Hill Select - a new division designed to support vendors looking to rapidly grow across EMEA - comes two months after the distributor bagged investment from Rigby Private Equity to help it expand in EMEA itself.
Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick billed open-source software management specialist Black Duck as the perfect opening vendor for the unit, which sits outside of Wick Hill's core portfolio.
"There are huge security risks around open source that people are completely unaware of and we see this as a huge opportunity for the channel both in terms products and also services," he said.
Wick Hill currently serves about eight territories in Europe through its UK and DACH offices but Kilpatrick hinted that it is ready to broaden its coverage through acquisition.
"We are in discussions with a number of like-minded VADs across the region," he said.
Wick Hill will work as the sole UK and EMEA distributor for US-based Black Duck, which claims its technology is in hot demand after open source vulnerabilities were found to be at the centre of a spate of recent breaches, including Heartbleed.
Kevin Bland, director of channel and alliances at Black Duck, said 95 per cent of the scans it has carried out have identified the presence of open source having been introduced by developers.
"We do something quite unique, which is to help companies identify what open source they are using in their applications and what the security vulnerabilities and compliance issues of those components are," he said.
"Being an organisation coming into the European market and expanding, the question is ‘do you build it or buy those services?'. Wick Hill represents to us the ability to lean heavily on their services capabilities through one core relationship."
Wick Hill will help US-based Black Duck recruit the security specialist partners it is seeking to attract under its new partner programme. Five of its 10 UK resellers are security specialists, including Intellect, Bland said.
"The partners they work with talk to customers about their security challenges and that's the market we want to accelerate in fast," said Bland. "We fit nicely into Wick Hill's portfolio because we represent an ability for their resellers to talk to customers about an application-level threat, which they may not be aware of but is very important."
Kilpatrick said Wick Hill Select will take on more high-growth vendors looking to expand their EMEA footprint but declined to put a number on how many and over what time scale. The division will offer vendors a range of services including marketing support, pre- and post-sales engineering and consultancy.
"We want to work with a small, focused group," he said. "I get approached about 80 times a year so the challenge is making sure we are able to deliver the service to the standard the vendors would want if they were delivering it themselves."
Wick Hill Select will offer vendors requiring pan-European coverage something different, Kilpatrick added.
"We don't compare ourselves with Exclusive Networks, Arrow, Infinigate or Ingram," he said. "We want to deliver a common proposition with consistent deliver across the region. If you go into the past, vendors have looked for pan-European delivery with large European distribution organisations and they've had European distribution contracts but in many cases inconsistent deliver - and that's not our goal."