Channel enabler recruits local disties for AscenLink

A new organisation looking to foster relationships between Asian-based technology companies and the Australian and New Zealand channel has signed its first distribution partner.

Business Development Asia-Pacific has been appointed by Singapore-based distributor, MediaWeb, to help enlist local suppliers for its new WAN load balancing and bandwidth management product, AscenLink. MediaWeb was appointed as the master distributor for AscenVision's products in the South Asian region in May.

Business Development's charter is to bring Asian companies to the A/NZ market. It also plans to aid Australian organisations to develop new markets for their products in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company's general manager, Brendon Granger, said it would work to identify the market potential for the technology, appoint distributors, assist the distributors in developing the channel for the product and then provide ongoing marketing support.

"We also provide regular reporting and updates to clients overseas to ensure that they are kept up-to-date with the local market and their products' performance and potential," he said.

Granger's work in appointing A/NZ distributors for MediaWeb has already born fruit, with Dovetail distribution in Australia and Observatory Crest Limited in New Zealand all set to sign up for the AscenLink product.

General manager of Dovetail distribution, Max Fredericks, said resellers had expressed interest in the product before its distribution agreement with MediaWeb had been finalised.

"We are very interested in this product which adds to our security portfolio," he said.

One customer in the banking and finance sector wants to trial one of the enterprise AscenLink models in early January, Fredericks added.

AscenLink is an edge server appliance normally located at the boundary of LAN and WAN. It congregates on an organisation's different ISP and WAN links providing load balancing and WAN fault tolerance for those links. It also comes bundled with a Firewall and QoS.

The AscenLink product comes in one of four models. The entry-level version cost around $5500 and allows three WAN links at 10Mbps with four 10/100 Base-TX ports. The top-end large enterprise version allows 40 WAN links at unlimited bandwidth with two 10/100 Base-TX ports, three 10/100/1000 Base-TX ports and one 1000/Base-SX port, for $42,000.