Lan 1 buys Blue Sky

Lan 1 has purchased the full business assets of Sydney-based distributor, Blue Sky Industries (BSI), for an undisclosed sum.

Lan 1 managing director, Daniel Lee, told ARN that Blue Sky’s engineering capabilities were a very attractive part of the business.

BSI has a presence in the enterprise security space and customers in the federal and state government, military and financial services sectors. The acquisition will help boost Lan 1’s capabilities in the enterprise market, he said.

Lan 1 technical director, John Hamill, said the distributor had been working its way towards servicing enterprise customers as well as its SMB base through its 2000 resellers.

"Bringing in the expertise from BSI will certainly give that a serious push along," he said. "They've got a very strong engineering and support team and they've been looking after enterprise customers through their reseller channel.

"We do overlap with a lot of resellers, but we really only had the support capabilities for SMB customers and we weren't really capable of doing a multi-site rollout for a reseller. This will give us the ability to do that."

The acquisition would help double Lan 1’s technical department, enabling 24/7 support and on-site services. A number of BSI vendors, such as Reflex and Array Networks, will be transitioned across and all six staff will be kept on-board. This will boost Lan 1's staff to about 50.

Hamill said the acquisition would also give it local support in Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth.

"They have engineers in those places and it gives us the ability to do pre-sales visits with our resellers and also some after sales support because we had originally been doing it from our Sydney office and flying in as required," he said. "We've now got feet on the ground.

"It also offers our existing reseller base some good potential as well." BSI will continue to run under the same branding, he said.

The sale comes a month after Blue Sky called in voluntary administrators, Woodgate and Co, on September 1. Administrators claimed to have received several expressions of interest to purchase the distribution business. The decision to appoint administrators was made after security vendor, Secure Computing, dropped BSI in favour of a sole distribution model with itX.

Secure country manager, Eric Krieger, said it had inherited BSI as a distributor after its acquisition of security player, CyberGuard, in mid-2005. Secure also had an agreement with Avnet but parted company with the distributor after it purchased Melbourne-based networking player, ChannelWorx, in November last year.

Secure conducted a 12-month review of its distributors before making a decision in July.

Blue Sky Industries was given until September 30.

Secure and itX had been working together for more than five years, Krieger said.

“We are aligning with what the other regions are doing,” he said. “A lot of vendors prefer a sole distribution model as it gives you more ability to influence and manage. We wanted a focused distributor and found itX to be a great company.”

The decision only affects Secure’s enterprise product lines and its SMB distribution ranks will remain unchanged, Krieger said.