Enterasys Targets Three Opportunity Bright Spots for Channel

Enterasys Networks is urging its channel partners to expand on their success by focusing on three areas of opportunity ripe for its networking wares: data center, wireless and physical surveillance.

“We as a company are building solutions to follow the megatrends in the industry,” said Chris Crowell, Enterasys president and CEO. “I genuinely believe the growth opportunity in data networking infrastructure is tremendous. There are too many things driving these changes. … In the next five years there will be explosion in need to update architecture, and the businesses that are slow to adopt new infrastructures are going to suffer.”

The convergence of IT and communications networks, the ubiquity of IP infrastructures, the pervasion of mobile devices – both business and personal – on company networks, and the increased use of virtualization and cloud computing are driving new customer needs, Crowell said.

In particular, data center, wireless and physical security all play into the changing face of network infrastructure – data center and wireless because of pure customer need and physical security due to the maturing of the technology.

“We think these three areas present the largest opportunity for our channel partners moving forward,” said Charlie Van Pelt, director of Channels and Business Development for North America at Enterasys. “We want to encourage our partners to line up their expertise with one or more of these areas, and we think with the way networks are moving, that’s what will happen.”

At the company’s Americas Partner Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 2-4, 2011, Enterasys outlined to its partners its product lineups that support the three areas of opportunity.

The data center, for example, represents what could be the largest area of opportunity as customers update their infrastructure to support faster speeds and feeds to and from the network, as well as newer technologies within the data center such as virtualization and cloud computing.

“The data center means money, and customers are looking for new and strategic partners at the end of the day,” said Markus Nispel, vice president of Solutions Architecture.

Wireless, as well, can be an incredible area of growth, especially for partners with customers seeing an influx of mobile devices on their network and who are grappling with the “bring your own device” dilemma.

But perhaps the newest story for channel partners is physical security. The ubiquity of IP networks coupled with the “settling in” of standards is making the space less of a free-for-all, said Kevin Brooks, who recently joined Enterasys to lead the company’s security push.

He noted security not just includes basic CCTV and badge readers, these days the technology also includes digital signage, barriers, door locks and access control. “Everything runs over IP these days – IP is taking over the networks,” he noted. “That has done a lot to make security much more accessible to the channel.”

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