WhiteGold fishes up Barracuda distribution

Niche security VAD WhiteGold Solutions has signed on to become the second Australian distributor for US-based anti-spam appliance vendor Barracuda Networks.

Dominic Whitehand, managing director at Sydney-based WhiteGold Solutions, said Barracuda would be the distributor's first pure-play anti-spam offering.

"We do have Blue Reef and Watchguard, but we talk to a lot of customers that already have a firewall and so on in place," he said.

Whitehand said that Barracuda appliances easily bolted on to a network to add spam protection. Companies such as ISPs, which handled large amounts of internet traffic, had already shown interest, he said.

"We are looking for resellers [for Barracuda] as well as taking it to our existing channel," Whitehand said.

Customers were increasingly asking for IT weapons against spam. Barracuda had excellent default settings, "about 10" different types of spam filtering, he said.

"Two-thirds of the solution is based on some of the stronger open source products, such as Spam Assassin, and the other third is proprietary," Whitehand said.

However, the appliances mainly targeted enterprise-level custom. Entry-level catered for about one million emails a day and 1000 active email users, he said.

"It goes right up to 25,000 active email users," Whitehand said.

Dean Drako, president and CEO at Barracuda Networks, said in a statement that distribution partnerships were "increasingly vital" to its success as it expanded globally.

"WhiteGold has built a solid reputation for providing trusted IT security," he said.

Drako claimed that Australian businesses needed to quickly regain control of their email to cut financial losses caused by spam and other network security breaches.

The company claims to provide its Barracuda Spam Firewall appliance to about 5000 enterprises. The vendor has offices in about 35 countries.