Jim Cook - Malwarebytes A/NZ regional director and Vikas Uberoy - A/NZ channel director
Malwarebytes has appointed former Fortinet country manager, Jim Cook, as regional director across Australia and New Zealand, as the cyber security vendor intensifies its push across Asia Pacific.
Cook will be responsible for building the local business on both sides of the Tasman through the company’s 100 per cent channel model.
Prior to his role at Fortinet, Cook worked at Check Point Software Technologies for nine years, most recently as enterprise sales director.
In addition, Vikas Uberoy has been named as A/NZ channel director, whose initial focus has been developing a channel strategy and connecting with the company’s existing partner base which up until now, has dealt with the vendor directly.
Despite officially launching local operations on February 1, 2017, ARN understands that both Cook and Uberoy have been with the company around three months prior to set up operations.
Uberoy told ARN that shortly after coming on board, he and Cook decided to follow a two-tier channel model, as this was the best way they saw to achieve local scale.
“That is why we have Cloud Distribution in Australia and Soft Solutions in New Zealand,” he said.
As previously reported by ARN, the company signed a deal with Cloud Distribution in November 2016, with the vendor's current partner base includind Somerville Group, Computer Merchants, The Missing Link, and NetOpt - it also boasts a local install base of over 100,000 users.
"We are looking at a dual distribution strategy [in Australia],” Uberoy said. “We are in conversations with another potential distribution partner, we can’t talk about it right now because we are under NDA [non-disclosure agreement], but we are just sussing things out to see how things pan out.
"We are looking at a volume and value distribution model. Cloud will service the lower to mid section of the market, with the second distributor we are looking at going a tier up."
Uberoy added that the vendor was looking for a distributor who can go after the tier one partners who have good relationships in that space.
To coincide with the executive appointments, Malwarebytes has released its channel programme for A/NZ.
The “Partnerbytes” programme works on a three-tier system with silver, gold and platinum designations - it also offers partner incentives and a deal registration programme.
