Netgear looks to channel to drive business division growth

Netgear is looking to the channel as it increases its business sales and targets increased growth from the corporate side of its business.

The networking player is well known on the consumer side, but its business line of products has been making significant inroads into the SME customer base.

Helping to guide that process is Pramod Badjate, president and general manager of Netgear for Business, who joined their business nine months ago, knowing from the start that the firm was ambitious about growing its channel business.

“The reason I came to Netgear is [because what] I heard from…our new CEO, as well as the board, is that the company was seeing traction with small and medium enterprises. They see the opportunity to grow,” he said.

“More than half the company is associated more on the consumer side, with the consumer brand…but half of our business in the faster growing, more profitable part of the business – Netgear for Business.”

Netgear has not only been developing products that appeal to business users, but it has invested in the team required to support the channel.

“Our aspirations are to grow…very fast, and that requires having the right team, which I’m really excited about,” said Badjate. “The new people I’ve added to my team over the past nine months, many of them are well-known in the industry in what they do. I have a new channel lead, I have a new lead for SES and support.

“I feel like I have the right team now for the transformation to even more firmly establish ourselves as a business brand. [And that journey] is sort of threefold. One is what we are doing from a product perspective. Second is what we are doing from a go-to-market perspective. Third is what we are doing from a marketing perspective.”

On the product side, the goal is to provide an integrated solution for SMEs that not only meets their needs but can be supported by the channel.

“The small and medium enterprises, which are essentially low IT environments largely served by MSPs, face two choices, and both are not good,” said Badjate. “One of those choices is to buy solutions which are built for larger enterprises and are being force fit for smaller [customers]. You end up paying lot more for complexity that you don’t need.

“[If] you have a solution which is too expensive and too complicated for what you need and those solutions are not meant for MSPs…it’s not as easy for MSPs to manage it.

“We want to be purposely focused on 99% of the business who are, like less than 500 employees, and provide an end-to-end, integrated solution with right size, pricing and licensing,” he said.

The channel is also key to the go-to-market strategy, with the networking player keen to cultivate existing relationships and arm partners with the tools to unlock business.

“If you’re an SME, you want something integrated, reliable and purpose-built for being managed by MSPs,” said Badjate. “You will be able to get all aspects of the network, Wi-Fi, switching, routing, all the form factors and sizes, along with cloud management and security – everything from us – well-integrated.

“From a go-to-market point of view, we want to be the easiest to do business with. Because we’re dealing with partners, we want to make it so that the way they transact with us, the way they make their profits in terms of margins with us, we are transparent and consistent,” he added.

Partners can expect a fresh channel programme to come from the vendor in the next few weeks as it looks to enhance the support and rewards it can provide.

“We’re going aggressively after a route to markets in terms of who we are focused on,” said Badjate. “We’re going to be signing up MSPs, because we have a lot of MSPs that come in as a result of the security acquisition. So, we’re going to be focused on integrating with well-known MSP platforms, the ones through which some of our partners are already used to.”

With the impact of AI on networks and with staff returning to office, there is a rethink by customers over legacy infrastructure and the ongoing increase in WiFi speeds, meaning there are plenty of opportunities for the vendor and its partners to tap into growth.

“There’s going to be a lot of effort on all aspects...getting the world to know about us, recruiting these new partners, and showing them that there is value in doing business with Netgear,” Badjate concluded.