Tecksel signs two vendors new to Australian channel

Distributor Tecksel has signed two new vendors, German networking gear maker Level One and Australian security company NetLeverage, as part of a drive to sell more into wholesale and education.

Mark Kofahl, director at Tecksel, said he believed both brands offered something unique in the Australian market.

Level One's range of network hardware brought European quality to a sector largely dominated by Asian brands, he said.

'It doesn't look like just another Taiwanese product. It has German marketing and German design,' Kofahl said. 'The product quality is quite outstanding. From all the investigation that Tecksel has made, we can't fault the product quality.'

Another advantage was the brand's targeting of SMBs. Level One had also helped Tecksel show at Sydney's CeBIT trade show last week, he added.

Level One had strong presence in electrical wholesale in Europe, and electrical wholesale was a forecast growth area for Tecksel, Kofahl said.

The German company's products included switching, NAS, projector servers, IP Cameras, KVM, multimode fibre, media converters, wireless, DSL & VPN products, he  said.

'We are hoping to bring another range of networking products to Australia and hoping to deliver a brand to our resellers that offers them a greater margin,' Kofahl said.

Meanwhile, NetLeverage's security software and appliances focused on layer seven –- the main content layer of a network.

Kofahl said NetLeverage offered Australian-developed options for network security that could help Tecksel dig deeper into the hot security market.

'They gave us a call, saying they'd got some fantastic security devices but they really needed to take it past the first level ... and sign a distributor,' Kofahl said.

Steven Hasani, CEO and CTO at Sydney-based NetLeverage, said the company's products included ThinPoint XP-based thin client appliance servers, WebGuard individual internet access control appliance servers and NetPoint internet security appliances.

NetPoint is being marketed as an alternative to Microsoft's Small Business Server, but NetLeverage claims it offers better security features.

'Intrusion detection and prevention rests on layer seven. We look into the behaviour –- not just the headers -– and understand the behaviour of that binary [code] and use that to understand spamming, anti-virus or stop packets before it gets to the client level,' Hasani said. 'It's more than the headers -- it's being able to work with the right server on the network.'

Tecksel was NetLeverage's first distributor and the latter had no plans to sign more, he said.

'We want to work with Tecksel to take this product to market. Tecksel is very specialised in networking and they are nice guys and really look after their vendors and support innovation,' Hasani said.

Tecksel, which began in 1991, also carries vendors such as Kyocera, Brother and others in the retail space.

It aims to carry best-of-breed business products. The range includes laser printers, multi-function devices, fax machines, networking and security products, modems, UPS, KVM, Antennae, GPS products, mapping software, Toughbooks, plasma display and digital cameras.