Enterasys retrenches three staff

Networking company Enterasys Networks Australia has retrenched three sales staff in its Sydney and Melbourne offices.

Two Sydney-based sales reps Steve Jones and Charlie Creegan and one Melbourne-based rep Chris Evans were retrenched three weeks ago, company MD Gary Mitchell told CRN today.

Meanwhile, the company's Perth-based sales rep John Gonzalez would move across to Sydney to head up the company's national technical team. "John is one of our most experienced sales and technology members and he's had some exceptionally good success over in Perth in the last couple of years," Mitchell said.

Gonzalez had previously secured some large contract wins for the company. "I've asked him to head up the technical team countrywide and he's in the process of moving across right now."

In addition, Mitchell is in the process of hiring a national partner business development manager (BDM) at the company. "I'm open to a position in either Melbourne or Sydney," he said. He hinted that Enterasys would hire more BDMs in the future.

With Gonzalez moving to Sydney, Stan Peovitis would take responsibility for driving sales in Perth. "At the moment, he's a travelling resource based in Perth but he will be dedicated to the Perth marketplace from now."

While Mitchell declined to comment as to why these staff were retrenched, he said with the company's drive into the "secure networking" market there's a focus on placing business development managers to work with partners.

"I see that we're going to be doing more and more business directly with security, network-related organisations as opposed to driving it ourselves and working in conjunction with partners.

"A lot more [business] is going to come from security specialist organisations, so there was a real need to put that in place. I think this is a better approach," he said.

Mitchell claimed that Enterasys is the only network vendor that had implemented security technologies into the fabric of its switches as opposed to "bolting" more security technology onto an existing network infrastructure.

"The focus has moved away from purely the connectivity and capacity - the speeds and feeds of networking into implementing security right throughout the entire fabric of the network infrastructure.

"The network's the one thing that is present everywhere in an organisation. If you can embed some security technologies into that it certainly goes a long way to helping an organisation in their security battles," he said.

Enterasys' partner business in Australia was travelling well with the company looking to recruit "network security" partners in the future.

Last week, Enterasys completed secure networks training for 30 partners from around the country. Enterasys currently has around 13 staff in Australia, about two less than this time last year, he said.