A10 Networks' Ray Smets and WhiteGold Solutions' Leigh Howard. Photo: Mike Gee
With some 25 years experience, across companies such as Bellsouth, McAfee, Motorola and Cisco, A10 Network’s vice-president of worldwide sales, Ray Smets, has plenty of experience in Silicon Valley.
He has spent the last year with the company overseeing its charge into the rapidly emerging Application Delivery Controller (ADC) market, including its big push into Australia with new distie, Whitegold Solutions.
Smets said the key attribute he brings to the table is that he’s spent the majority of his career as a customer of these kinds of services, rather than a provider. Once he jumped over to Silicon Valley to supply that industry, such as through roles with McAfee and Packeteer, he also ran the global wireless business for Cisco.
Although A10 started out mostly as a load balancing networking provider for datacentres to broader horizons, such as products in the Application Delivery Controller space.
“It’s a bit broader than just load balancing now. That’s still the killer app in the ADC space, but its really about touching all the applications and services that go in and out of datacentres, and helping large scale enterprise and Web 2.0 companies manage those services more effectively,” he said.
Rather than attempting to do everything via hardware, A10 works in software – and so has become closely associated with the rapidly emerging SDN market.
In a Cloud-centric world, everything that the user wants sits in the datacentre. So it is now vital to pick the correct solution to manage those application workloads.
“Whatever you put in place is going to touch everything that’s going in and out of your datacentre – it cannot have any reliability issues, it cannot fail and it must scale, it must perform at peak loads flawlessly, and it has to have all the features and functions that the customer needs.”
Consolidation
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A10’s growth has been driven by this datacentre growth, but also by companies looking to move architectures around – inside datacentres.
Smets said A10’s moves to consolidate the datacentre in this space may have ruffled the large incumbents feathers.
“The traditional players tend to go about trying to upsell, go bigger, pull in more licensing, more complication. We consolidate that down, and move to the Cloud whenever we can, and go virtual on the edge,” he said.
Since joining A10 last year, he has been involved in the company’s Australian push, which includes its new partner program, Australia will be the first country it’s launched in outside of the USA.
Part of Australia’s appeal is the new privacy laws, the relative strength of our currency, and a traditional ‘open minded’ mindset about new technologies.
A10’s go-to-market is 100 per cent channel, which means it will be leaning on Whitegold Solutions heavily. The focus will be on a classic three tier program, including certification levels, hands-on staff training and marketing revenue support, including incentives.
Already dealer registration has been ‘excellent’ he said, on the back of its international reputation.
