IPL Communications has signed a 12-month sub-distribution deal to provide a range of Netgear products to its resellers. The two companies will initially focus on switches, access points, VPN firewalls and wireless controllers.
According to Netgear account manager, Peggy Soo, the deal was signed three weeks ago after two months of negotiations.
“IPL saw an article in ARN at the beginning of the year saying Netgear was looking for distribution partners and looking to grow,” she said. “Netgear complements what they’re doing and we don’t sell anything that would hinder what they’re doing because we don’t have VoIP phones, cameras or video conferencing.”
Netgear has five Australian distributors: Dicker Data, Ingram Micro, BMS Technology, Synnex and J Mills. Soo insisted IPL wouldn’t greatly impact their business.
“[IPL] is very niche. They’re selling the product with IT PBXs as a solution and that’s their main focus – everything else will come about if people are requesting certain products,” she said.
“How we work with IPL is different to how we’d work with Dicker Data or Ingram. At the very beginning, it’s more about getting a feel of how we’re going to work. After that we’ll get some more guidelines in terms of dollar values in terms of what they need to do.”
IPL Communications general manager, Paul Scanlan, said his company had been looking for a switch provider for the past 18 months.
He said there were no other products in its range that conflicted with Netgear’s offering.
“This is a straight add-on. It’s a great deal for some of the telco dealers because they’d be nervous if we brought on something like Cisco or Juniper because those data vendors have got an element of voice in their ranges,” Scanlan said. “We thought it’d be more suited to the top 30 IP-centric partners, but since we’ve done the soft-launch we’ve gotten so much feedback from all over our channel.
“They’re all asking for products that are not on the initial product list so over the next four weeks there’ll be a settling period where we expand the range we carry. It looks like we’ll carry quite a few more products than we thought.”
