Vendor claims to have expanded its partner support capabilities as it looks to recruit more resellers.

Networking vendor Netgear has reaffirmed the importance of its channel by putting a greater focus on specific vertical markets.

The firm claimed to have expanded its global channel and internal support capabilities as it continues to court new partners.

Patrick Lo, chief executive of Netgear, told CRN: “We see our VAR business growing very well. We have increased our global resellers by 20 per cent over the past year. We now have 30,000 partners worldwide.

“We are undertaking vertical campaigns and feeding leads to the channel. We will put more effort into this with a series of roadshows. Education is a big vertical for us, as are food stores and hotel chains.”

Lo added that Netgear has expanded its internal sales team to engage with partners to offer more dedicated post-sales support.

“Over the past year we have beefed up our channel programmes and our internal resources,” he said. “We are also moving to larger offices in the UK and have released some key products.”

Mark Power, country manager UK and Ireland at Netgear, said: “We traded with 7,000 resellers last year, and we plan to roll out more channel programmes and incentives. We have 4,000 dedicated UK PowerShift partners.”

Keith Humphreys, managing consultant of research firm EuroLAN, said: “Netgear is well thought of in the channel. It is a sensible alternative to Cisco. It seems to have the right number of VARs, but it is hard to have dialogue with that number of partners.”

Humphreys added that it is a good idea to focus on alternative verticals such as food stores and hotel chains, because Cisco has the lucrative banking and finance sectors “sewn up”.