IT security firm, Bitdefender, has appointed SMS eTechnologies to act as its local office in Australia.
The new local arm of the Romanian security company operates on a 100 per cent channel model, launched a program along with its GravityZone 2.0 offering and held two events in Melbourne and Sydney.
Bitdefender described the arrangement as a country partnership and has a history of similar arrangements in other markets, having a similar relationship with a company in France since 1998.
SMS has previously had a similar relationship in Australia with Kaspersky Lab, acting as its local proxy for four years before the vendor set up an Australian shop.
SMS eTechnologies managing director, Colin Westbury, said one of the things that attracted the company to Bitdefender was that the vendor had a proven history of sticking by its well performing proxy vendor partners.
It has been working with Bitdefender on a local strategy for the last six months and is actively looking for new partners to grow its channel footprint.
“Bitdefender treats us as an office,” he said.
“They call us a country partner, people here don’t really understand what a country partner is because they expect to see the traditional vendor, distributor relationship, but for all intensive purposes, SMS eTechnologies is Bitdefender in Australia.”
The country partner has a couple of legacy distributors, Pulse Technology and BD Australia.
“Their focus has always been on the consumer market, they have been on board for eight years and now they are having to evolve as any distributor has to, it’s just the nature of the market,” Westbury said.
“We have a 100 per cent channel-centric model, we live and die by the channel. It takes a long time to build trust with the channel partners, you only have to do one thing wrong and you are finished.
“As a result, we are anal retentive about our channel relationships. The channel is extraordinarily paranoid about vendors and distributors cutting their lunch.”
