Packeteer boss resigns

Packeteer South Pacific country manager Peter Owen has resigned after more than four years in the job.

Owen has started the Australia and New Zealand operation of US-based integrated security device vendor Crossbeam Systems.

In the mean time, Sydney-based Packeteer systems engineer Bede Hackney would run the operation until a replacement is found, Owen told CRN.

Packeteer markets application traffic management products for WANs.

Owen said he needed a new challenge. "I was going on to five years -- I thought that the timing was nice," he said.

Since landing here five years ago, Packeteer had built a successful business in Australia signing distribution agencies with Express Data and LAN Systems and partnerships with the likes of Dimension Data, IBM, CSC and Telstra, Owen said.

Last calendar year, the company grew by 36 percent on the year earlier, Owen said. "Packeteer is one of the few startups in Australia that's still around from the dot-com doomsdays," Owen said.

Owen officially starts at Crossbeam on 2 May. Crossbeam -- an integrated security device pioneer --developed switching technology that will run any security software application on a single device, Owen said. Crossbeam's Asia-Pacific technical director Gavin Rae is based in Sydney.