WatchGuard growth in New Zealand outpaces the world

Firewall vendor builds up reseller channel, encouraging security services on top of installs

By Simon Eskow, Auckland | Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Security solutions provider WatchGuard says business in New Zealand is growing at a much faster pace than it is globally.

The company has experienced 200 percent year-over-year revenue growth in New Zealand as of last month according to regional director Pat Devlin.

Devlin ascribes this to the organisation’s penetration in the medium enterprise sector with uptake of the organisations larger XTM firewall packages, and from doubling its stable of resellers over the last 12 months.

“New Zealand is an interesting market in that there is a large representation of vendors for a smaller opportunity slice, compared to North America,” Devlin says. “All the major vendors are represented, so it makes for a much more competitive market.”

Devlin says the company has relied on its distributor Exeed to give the vendor a local presence and to aid in the word-of-mouth reputation Devlin says has been integral to growth in New Zealand. Exeed runs events for WatchGuard, while the vendor runs face-to-face training sessions. Over the last 12 months, 40 people have been trained in WatchGuard technology, which Devlin says is a higher percentage than the company has seen in Australia.

Devlin says WatchGuard in the past had a strong SMB presence, but it is setting its sights on larger organisations, and getting resellers to build managed services around firewall implementation.

“Even if customers prefer to own their own gateway, many don’t have the skills to install and manage it,” Devlin says . “A lot of partners are inventing a practice around gathering logs, audit, it’s a great value to the customer, and we are encouraging them to build a security practice with ongoing revenue, and get all our partners thinking about renewals.”

Devlin says WatchGuard has seen interest in a model where resellers dealing with smaller organisations employ the enterprise grade firewalls for security as a service. But the more common practice is remote linking to customers, gathering log data, and managing reports.

“A lot of people are turning to their security practice to focus on as a great way to generate ongoing revenue,” he says.