Vendor plans dedicated team to tie down all customer service contract renewals

Security vendor SonicWall’s chief executive has pledged to pour more money into the UK channel in response to lightening growth.

Speaking ahead of SonicWall’s recent UK partner conference, Matt Medeiros said UK revenues had rocketed 33 per cent year on year in the first half of 2007, substantially outstripping company-wide growth.

“We recognise the UK is growing at a very high rate and our investment will be appropriate to that,” said Medeiros.

SonicWall plans to build a dedicated service renewal team that will chase up customers whose services contracts are about to expire and highlight the opportunity of subscription services to VARs.

Medeiros said 50 per cent of its total revenues now come from subscription services, although the figure is just 40 per cent in the UK.

SonicWall is also hoping to make inroads into the enterprise channel following its acquisition of enterprise SSL VPN vendor Aventail.

Keith Bird, managing director of the UK and Northern Europe at SonicWall, said: “We suddenly have a basket of products and services that are not just relevant to SMEs, but also to the enterprise space.

“This gives our smaller partners a great opportunity to creep into the mid-market and makes us more pertinent to larger systems integrators.”

Duncan Hume, security director at distributor Bell Micro, said: “We are seeing significant growth with SonicWall and its move into the enterprise space sits well with us. We have an enterprise sales force servicing enterprise resellers and system integrators.”