Nominet on the hunt for 12 partners in 12 months

Domain registry vendor looking for new partners to sell first commercial product

Domain registry vendor Nominet is on a mission to find a dozen partners in a year to sell its first commercial product, Turing.

Nominet runs the country code and registry for .uk web pages, and its first commercial product, Turing, was created to help manage the registry.

Chris Griffiths, director of Nominet, explained: "Turing is a domain name system (DNS) analytics platform. DNS is the phonebook of the internet; it is the backbone of the internet.

"We found we could use Turing to help us manage all the security and everything connected to running the .uk registry, and as we developed the product we realised that perhaps others would benefit from using it."

Nominet has decided to use reseller partners to sell Turing because of the size and scale of the operation, Griffiths said.

"We are not a huge company, and there are about 15 to 20 people on my team," he explained. "There are organisations out there already deploying DNS and we found that working with those partners who already have sales channels is a nice match.

"It gives us the flexibility to work with those companies to build the channel globally."

The vendor has already signed one reseller this week, which will be acting as distributor for the product as well. While Griffiths was unable to reveal who the partner is, he did mention it has already sold one licence, with a couple more deals currently being finalised.

"We are actively discussing with two other DNS resellers. As we develop further we would like to start working with systems integrators as well," he added.

Nominet's partner programme for Turing launched this week, and Griffiths said its major focus for the near future is to grow the programme.

"From our perspective DNS is a highly visible, highly important protocol on the internet. When it stops working, all the networks stop working. It is a core part of the internet. While it is easy to set up, it is very hard to operate on large networks, and that is something this tool helps with."