Chris Barton is excited about the year ahead

Clearswift’s partnership with Connector Systems was a step in the right direction

By Vera Alves, Auckland | Friday, 16 December 2011
Chris Barton finds it hard to believe, but it really has been a whole year since he joined web and email security specialist Clearswift as regional channel manager for APAC.

Time has flown by, he says, because it has been a busy but very productive and exciting year.

“It’s been extremely positive. We’ve got a few new partners,” he says. The company this year ended its relationship with Distribution Central and signed on Connector Systems as its sole New Zealand distributor. “It was a big step in the right direction,” says Barton.

“We have got quite a few big customers in New Zealand, especially in the government sector, that we want to maintain, as well as acquiring new customers,” he adds.

Earlier this year, the company extended two partner incentive programmes into New Zealand. Barton says that, looking at the year ahead, the plan is also to grow Clearswift’s partner base in the country. He says he is in talks with a few potential new partners and that there may be some news coming from the company in the beginning of 2012.

“We realise we are in a highly competitive market,” he says. “Pretty much every sale we are involved in is a displacement sale,” Barton adds. “It takes a certain level of maturity to be successful [in this business].”

Born and bred in Central Otago, Barton moved to Sydney in 1998 but took on a number of regional roles that have helped him to maintain strong ties with New Zealand. His CV includes a stint as the New Zealand sales manager at Websense and as the ANZ regional manager at Sonicwall, among others. His current Asia Pacific role is broader, geographically speaking, but still sees Barton visiting this side of the Tasman as often as possible, to meet with both customers and partners.

“New Zealanders are early adopters and that is refreshing and exciting. In New Zealand, you can be a smaller vendor, like Clearswift, and have partners that can understand your solution and get it to market quite quickly,” he explains.

“Australians will probably wait until it’s proven, “ he adds. “It is a strength of New Zealand.”

Meeting with partners and customers is what he most likes about the IT industry. “I get to meet a wide variety of people, in different roles, in different parts of the world,” he says. His current job involves a fair deal of travelling (he had just returned from a work trip to Taiwan when Reseller News interviewed him). “It’s not uncommon to wake up in a city other than Sydney,” he says.

A typical day includes “an early scan of the Blackberry to see what happened in the UK overnight, meetings with partners and customers for most of the day. At the end of the business day, probably a flight, a call with management and a final check of the Blackberry”.

With such a hectic work schedule and a new baby on the way, Barton has been working on trying to find a better work/leisure balance. “I always try to be in Sydney to make the kids’ special events and I hide the Blackberry on the weekends,” he says.

Barton says he never intended to work in IT but a casual encounter with an technology startup owner at a wedding in Sydney in 1998 led to his first job in the industry. “He offered me a job at the wedding and the rest is history.”