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Gigamon planning closer ties with more channel partners
The network visibility specialist is aiming to double the number of focused partners it works with over the course of this year
Network visibility specialist Gigamon is planning to increase its reseller numbers this year and grow the indirect business after a period of significant changes.
Last year saw the vendor change ownership, gain a largely fresh management team and undergo a review of its channel that saw it consolidating in the UK with a single distributor.
Under the leadership of John Mitchell, EMEA partner director at Gigamon, one of the first moves the firm made was to look at its channel across the UK and Europe and work on increasing its effectiveness.
With the firm positioning itself strongly as the link between the networking and security world it chose to consolidate its disties and parted with Arrow in September and chose to increase the territories across EMEA it worked with Exclusive Networks.
The plans for this year include working with Exclusive to expand the partner base to increase the number of partners that work closely with the vendor.
"We don't want a lot of partners but a healthy number of between 25 to 30, that are really focused on us, which would be doubling what we have at the moment," he said.
“We have gone from opportunistic involvement to being much more aligned and have prioritized engagement with partners and are seeing some of those investments are already paying dividends,” he added.
The firm is also investing in its channel team and has hired staff to work with distribution, provide account management and it is on the brink of bringing on board a global SI sales director and a technical architect to work with some of those market players.
"We want to grow our enterprise revenue in the UK, France, Germany and Italy and the Middle East and if we do that then it will put us in a strong place," he added.
The biggest change to Gigamon last year was the $1.6bn acquisition by private equity player Elliot Management in October. That move was welcomed by staff and has gone down well with partners.
Mitchell said that the change of ownership had given it more financial muscle and gave the firm the opportunity to be more agile and give it the chance to aim for a market leading position in the network visibility space.
