Marshal targets channel growth with appointment of Nadine Barnard

Marshal South Africa has appointed Nadine Barnard into a new channel manager position created to help manage the country's anticipated growth, after it experienced exceptional growth over the last 12 months.

Barnard, with 13 years of experience in the distribution channel and six specifically in the security channel, will focus on Marshal's local distribution channel, reporting to Michael Clifford, VP for EMEA.

"Marshal has experienced very strong adoption in the enterprise space due to the product's stability and scalability," says Barnard. "The brand is well suited to the mid-market in South Africa due to its ease of deployment, configurability, maintainability, and is exceptionally well priced compared with the competition."

Barnard says local businesses are still facing an enormous spam problem that threatens to cripple networks.

"Bandwidth is expensive in South Africa and organisations cannot afford to subsidise a spam problem," she says. "The ability to control content filtering - filtering the information that enters and leaves the corporate network - is rapidly becoming a high priority for South African businesses."

Data leakage is another issue that is appearing on local corporate radars.

Marshal provides e-mail, Web, and end-point security as well as security reporting. All play an important part in protecting an organisation's confidential data.

The company's flagship product is its MailMarshal SMTP e-mail content security solution. It unifies anti-spam, e-mail threat protection, content security, policy enforcement and data leakage prevention into a scalable, flexible and manageable solution.

"Marshal's SMTP product dominates its space in the local market," says Riaan Otto, GM of 10Net ICT Solutions, which distributes the product locally. "The product has primarily sold through word of mouth but Nadine's appointment, which strengthens Marshal's commitment to the local channel, will see focus brought to bear on this and other Marshal products that we expect will have a significant impact on market growth."

"MailMarshal SMTP addresses spam at the customer's gateway and we will release some major enhancements for this product early this year," says Barnard. "We've also just released a new version of WebMarshal which provides multi-functional Web protection which goes beyond URL filtering. The rise in malicious Web-borne threats combined with the popularity of non-work-related Web sites and Web applications, can leave organisations increasingly vulnerable. WebMarshal controls 'backdoor' data leakage by controlling and filtering file and content uploads to external Web sites."