Network monitoring company, Paessler AG, has appointed Red Education its first official training partner in Asia-Pacific to deliver training and certification for its PRTG Network Monitor product to channel partners and customers.
The program will also be a pilot for the vendor’s training and certification in other regions.
Paessler AG senior sales manager A/NZ, George Wilson, told ARN the vendor had been trying to develop its own training program with mixed success.
“We quickly realised that the missing piece was that we did not have a professional arm that could deliver the training,” he said.
Wilson noted that participants in the vendor’s online training program had a high failure rate either because of dropouts or differences in technical skill level.
“There was a clear requirement to engage with someone who could fill that skill set for us,” he added.
He explained that Paessler approached Red Education because the training organisation had physical reach in Asia-Pacific, which is the pilot region the company is launching the service, and its expertise in delivering virtual training.
Red Education managing director, Rob Howard, said the first training courses were scheduled in October and it is working closely with the Paessler team to get those courses to run.
“We usually run the first couple of courses on low numbers so that we can make sure we get any wrinkles ironed out before we have larger classes of twelve or more people,” he added.
Growing the partner base
Wilson said the training and certification through Red Education would give Paessler reach into different channels that the vendor would not otherwise be able to service.
“That is the most important thing, Red Education has a lot of commercial flexibility and they fit in very nicely within the channel.
"Red Education does not restrict its services to users or channel partners, the company also allows channel partners to bundle a training with deployments and distributors to service partners with training.
“It empowers the PRTG Network Monitor training to be delivered in the most efficient way which I think will be unique as opposed to our competitors,” Wilson said.
He added that the company was seeing an increase of PRTG installations across Asia-Pacific of around 30 per cent so it made sense to approach this in a structured manner.
“[Our] capability is largely driven through the channel,” Howard explained. “The bulk of our training sales are through the channel and that allows the channel to attach training to deals as well as training their own personnel.”
“We cover all of Asia-Pacific with our Paessler offering and so it is a bolt on to our existing business and we have trained up a number of people across the region to be able to deliver this portfolio of courses to the market so there will be full coverage from day one across Asia-Pacific.”
Wilson added that because Paessler’s technology spreads beyond the network into the Internet of Things (IoT), the vendor saw opportunity for partners to begin to develop scripts for PRTG to address customer need.
“There is going to be a demand to learn in depth how the system and programmable tools work so then they [channel partners] can start deploying PRTG outside the traditional network.
“I think it will be a very short time before the market starts making enquiries as to whether we are offering those types of training and certifications specific to industries.”
Paessler AG has a sole distribution agreement in Australia with Dicker Data.
