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Cyberoam to appoint SA channel head

Alex Kayle
By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist
Athens, Greece, 14 Feb 2011

Cyberoam revealed it is looking to appoint a channel sales manager for SA.

This follows increasing investment into the country by the identity-based unified threats management (UTM) company, who has identified SA as its strongest region in the continent in terms of sales revenue.

This is according to Alkesh Soneji, Cyberoam manager for business development, in an interview during the Cyberoam Partner Summit, in Athens.

“We are currently in talks with our local distributors and partners working on getting a new channel sales manager for the next quarter of this year. We need to streamline our partner programme in SA in terms of discount, doing local events and inviting their customers.”

Africa is key

Soneji said the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is a growing market for the security industry.

“In Europe and the US, the growth is small in percentage because of the recession and other factors such as increasing competition,” said Soneji.

“However, Cyberoam has an edge over its competitors in the UTM space, because we are present in many economies, and already have an extensive channel network.”

According to Soneji, organisations' budgets are still tight and businesses are still looking for cost-effective security solutions that provide value to the business. He said this trend also follows emerging regions in the MEA.

“Companies in the next few years will be deploying security solutions that are cost-effective and match their level of technologies.

“Priorities for 2011 will be the channel and how to improve our relationships with partners. Our goal will be to invest in training and local events to work with our partners, in order to support them and bring them to the next level.”

Generating awareness

Soneji said Cyberoam has partnered recently with training centres in Tanzania, Kenya and Nigeria. During the summit, Cyberoam signed up Zimbabwe distributor IDSS.

Local distributor Lynton Lubbe, IndIT technology distribution, product manager for Cyberoam SA, won the sales manager of the year and distributor award for the year from Cyberoam.

Lubbe said that while UTM has been in SA for a while, this market has traditionally been dominated by Fortinet and SonicWALL. He said the biggest security challenge in SA is creating awareness around potential network threats.

“We are having a road show soon this quarter to generate awareness around UTM. We have a presence in Johannesburg and Cape Town and now plan to penetrate the market in Durban.”

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