Aruba Wireless signs Zircon as Aust distributor

Switchmaker Aruba Wireless has signed Zircon to distribute its range of wireless LAN switches and mobility systems for enterprise networks.

Mark Robards, Asia-Pacific vice-president at Aruba Wireless, said the networking vendor had signed up Zircon to build its Australian channel. Aruba was 100 percent indirect sales, he said.

Zircon would remain its only Australian distributor for the foreseeable future, he said.

"A window is really opening up for this kind of architecture," Robards said. "The Australian market is furthering our strategy as we're a pre-IPO company. We want to make us a worldwide business and Australia represents five percent of the market."

Robards said vendors and resellers would tap what he claimed was a "pent-up demand" for mobile and wireless networking and IP-based telecommunications.

"[For instance] people are really exploring VoIP with the advent of dual-mode handsets," he said. "People are going to eventually realise they don't need the blue cable anymore."

Aruba Wireless won a deal to do Microsoft's wireless LAN, serving 25,000 users across 60 countries. The vendor makes gear for smaller SMBs, large enterprises that need thousands of Access Points and every size organisation in between, Robards said.

"It's all software-compatible and its a very broad product line," he said.

Gwen John, managing director at Zircon, said the distributor would give its resellers all kinds of help to sell Aruba products, including training, before and after sale support, marketing assistance and demonstration resources.

"We want to offer them as much support as possible," she said.

Zircon believed voice-over-wireless would be "a very big thing" in future and it wanted to be ready. Aruba offered a route to convert wired networking to wireless networking and a platform on which to build managed communications services, John said.

The agreement with Aruba built on Zircon's recent acquisition of NSW hardware vendor Global Business Technology. That purchase gave the company fresh reseller blood through which it could sell IP-based managed services.