Kemp Technologies has recruited former Riverbed exec Ed Martin as its UK sales manager to support the firm’s growing channel, specifically driving sales into larger enterprise and strategic accounts.
Kemp, which last year grew sales in the UK by 40 percent, says the appointment is part of a strategy to target ‘larger ticket’ opportunities for its range of load balancers and ADCs (Application Delivery Controllers).
“Kemp is going from strength to strength and is already positioned as a leading provider of high-performance hardware and virtual load balancing and ADC solutions,” comments Martin (pictured). “While its traditional market has been in the SME space, my focus at KEMP is to support channel sales into large enterprise accounts where we offer a very strong price/performance solution against the established players.”
“With 40 percent growth last year and ambitious targets for 2104, we are looking forward to drawing on Ed’s experience and knowledge to harness the growing demand for load balancers and ADCs,” adds Leigh Bradford, regional director Northern Europe for KempTechnologies. “It will be our channel partners who will help us meet our targets so we want to give them all the support we can.”
In July 2013 Kemp brought Rob Duggan on board from distributor Zycko to help drive expansion with the appointment of new partners.
The vendor currently has 15 authorised partners and one Kemp Centre partner East Sussex-based System Professional. Recent signings include Ultima and Phoenix.
Enterprise push
The last couple of years have seen Kemp move further into the enterprise from its established SMB customer base. In fact, according to Bradford, the vendor conducted research last year that confirmed 52 percent of its business was now at enterprise level [1000 seats plus]. “Even though we have a price point for SMB, a higher percentage of our business in coming from the enterprise, which we were quite surprised by,” he explains.
Kemp has also gained access to enterprise-sized customers through it’s alliances with both Cisco and Microsoft.
The optimised version of the KEMP ADC operating system runs natively on any Cisco UCS server and has passed Cisco Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT). Meanwhile, Kemp’s Edge Security Pack (ESP) provides additional security features to fill the gap left by Microsoft’s discontinuing of its Forefront Threat Management Gateway (TMG) – which is offered free of charge for Kemp load balancer and ADC customers.
Bradford, however, maintains the firm is sticking to it’s mantra of ‘easy to use’. “A lot of the big guys like F5 are very, very FTSE 250 focused. The price tags are tens of thousands of pounds…we now have a price point from SMB all the way up to enterprise, and the relationship with Cisco cements that,” he comments.
Martin was most recently Riverbed Technology’s sales director for Asia Pacific and Japan. He was also director of international channel sales at Zeus Technology, prior to its acquisition by Riverbed in 2011.
