Observatory Crest brings BYOD strategy up to speed

Distributor takes BlueCat to New Zealand now; Aerohive to follow in December

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Monday, 01 October 2012
Distributor Observatory Crest says its recent deals to bring two products to the New Zealand market are meant to fill out its BYOD portfolio here.

The company in early September announced that it would be distributing BlueCat Networks products in ANZ. BlueCat makes IP address management solutions which the distributor says fits in nicely with environments where IP addresses are assigned and reassigned to many users on a daily basis, such as on university campuses.

According to a statement, the solutions are “user-friendly, scalable and help to reduce the IT costs.”
Observatory Crest is now BlueCat’s exclusive dealer in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, the distributor has also signed on with WLAN solutions provider Aerohive to take its products to the Australia market first, then by the end of the year, to New Zealand as well, according to Observatory Crest director Martin Christmas.

Aerohive is also distributed in New Zealand by Connector Systems.

Christmas depicted both deals as a continued bolstering of its mobility management and security portfolio to give its 50 or so reseller partners more solutions to tackle the BYOD and mobility trend.

“Our BYOD strategy, if you like, started 15 months ago when we took on distribution of MobileIron,” says

Christmas. “What we have found through that is there is a huge demand among end users for anything BYOD. And so that became a strong conversation starter with CIOs and many enterprises, SME and large corporates. Whilst MobileIron filled one element of the BYOD story with the MDM component, there were clearly other areas of BYOD that people in certain circumstances were looking to address.”

Christmas says access policy management from vendor F5 is another component in the portfolio. Resellers can still do a lot of business with companies in this arena, Christmas says, because BYOD is still “new territory” and end users need experts to consult with.

“How to address this is complex because there are multiple elements that come into play with BYOD,” says Christmas. “It’s not just an MDM or wireless play. There are others that come into the mix there and partners that have a comprehensive go-to-market strategy around BYOD are going to have the most value to bring to enterprises and CIOs.”

Partner engagements can include consulting, solution architecture, deployment and maintenance.
“There’s quite a lucrative opportunity for many partners to get involved in delivery of professional services around this,” says Christmas. “Our experience is that for every dollar of MDM that is spent, there are probably another three dollars of services partners can deliver to both SME and enterprise to insure the technology meets the customers’ BYOD demands.”

Observatory Crest supports its New Zealand reseller community with a staff of six, based in Auckland and Wellington, with plans to add more staff in support of the new vendors by the end of the year.

Christmas says the distributor wants to support resellers dealing with SMBs, particularly for customers with a staff of 10 to 15 people,

“We definitely see a situation where the reseller has been the trusted advisor to an organisation and they are starting to worry about the sensitivity and security of the information going on their employees' devices,” Christmas says. “Those advisors would come to us and help put together a proposal of how, say MobileIron, will overcome some of those problems. And we will work with them and hold their hand for the first few deployments; through that process they will be able to get to the point and take it as a solution set to their other customers in their portfolio.”