Macnica Networks

Sep 8, 2023

Reseller News Netpoleon NZ builds team and partnerships amid sustained growth Country manager DJ Lamba shares insights on local growth Value-added distributor Netpoleon has seen three-digit year-on-year growth since launching in New Zealand last year. New Zealand and Pacific Islands country manager DJ Lamba started the role in July 2022, marking the beginning of a "substantial" expansion and tasked with growing a local team and building relationships with New Zealand channel partners. The Singapore-based distributor first indicated New Zealand expansion plans in 2020. It is the 11th country added to Netpoeon's Asia Pacific (APAC) roll, Lamba said. “In the last year we have grown massively as a company,” Lamba said, “We now have proactive relationships with over 25 partners in the country and ongoing discussions with about 25-30 more partners. “We are growing at a good organic pace, having done more business this year in the first half, than the whole of last year Australia and New Zealand-wide,” he said. Steady business growth has prompted the distributor to grow, with a new local channel development manager set to join the team in October, Lamba said. Within the next few months, he will also take on another channel sales engineer as well as grow the admin team. Lamba says that the driver of growth has been engaging with a “good mix” of niche cyber security-focused vendors who meet the needs of a widening cyber threat landscape to keep organisations safe, privacy compliant, risk-averse and safe from loss of business, reputation and revenue. “We have some very exciting vendors, some of whom are playing in a very niche space and are global leaders in what they do," he said. These vendors cover security solutions including DDoS, micro-segmentation, secure access service edge (SASE), security information and event management (SIEM), Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), application programming interface (API) security, threat intelligence, email security, network detection and response, identity and access manager and data security, Lamba outlined. Alongside continuing to build on existing vendor relationships, creating new partnerships is also “absolutely on the cards”, Lamba said. “We are predominantly looking to build strategic partnerships with channel partners, resellers, and managed security service providers (MSSPs) to build a proactive business model for our vendors and their technologies. "The relationships will be positioned to benefit all parties involved as well as contributing to business growth in the region. “The cyber security landscape is dynamic, and the threat landscape can change rapidly,” Lamba said. “It's essential for New Zealand, like any other country, to continually adapt and strengthen its cyber security measures to address evolving threats.” While growing the team and wider business is a positive step, this also represents one of the biggest market challenges for Lamba. “One of the key challenges faced in the industry is a lack of local and young talent,” he said. “Kiwis are known for innovation and their ability to adopt newer technologies better than most other countries; however, the brain drain and lack of enough talent is a cause of concern. “As a country, we need to ensure better school programmes to educate young kids on the industry and the prospects it offers.” A further challenge surrounds businesses operations with post-Covid approaches to remote working becoming “part of everyday life”, Lamba said. “This provides a challenge as well as an opportunity.” As a local branch of a wider company with a presence across APAC, Lamba said the New Zealand operations can be differentiated as a customer-focused distributor. “Netpoleon is known to be a technical-lead organisation in APAC that boasts its capability to serve our vendors and partners with presales/post-sales capabilities. “We in NZ like to work on growing the professional services capabilities of our partners, so they can best support their customer base on the technologies presented,” he said. “We have the technical capabilities to help our partner initially to get up to speed and in the interim, we help get them trained/certified to better serve the customers and strengthen their relationships with the vendors technically and commercially.” Netpoleon was acquired by Japan’s Macnica Networks in 2017. Lamba says this backing from a strong international organisation allows growth to continue while remaining focused on how best to serve the local market.