Palo Alto looks for local distributors

US-based firewall vendor, Palo Alto Networks, is on the hunt for two distributors in the Australian market after appointing David Thrum as its country manager.

Visiting president and CEO, Lane Bess, said it was time to make a decision in the Australian market on distributors and channel partners.

“I think at the distribution level, exclusivity is probably not the right thing to do, particularly when most distributors have a certain value they bring,” he said. “If you do it right, you can get distributors that are complementary in terms of penetrating the market. We’ll probably go with two distributors and hopefully an interested following of resellers they service.” The security distributor should be someone who has sold firewalls previously, has the technical capacity to support a firewall in a network and the ability to provide professional services and solutions, Bess said.

Thrum said the strongest verticals Palo Alto played into were predominantly government, education, health and finance.

Palo Alto provides demand generation programs, partner portal and tools. The vendor is also looking to recruit up to a dozen pre-sales and sales staff during the next 12 months to assist partners.

“Over the next 12 months we’ll need to have some representation in Sydney, Melbourne and other metro areas,” Bess said.

Prior to joining Palo Alto, Thrum previously helped start-up organisations in the Asia-Pacific region including Cheyenne Software, NetIQ and FalconStor.

Register now for the ARN Security Forum 2013 on June 4 at the Sydney Mint

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