It’s been doing business in North America for just under a year and already, G-Data Software AG, a security software vendor that originates in Germany, has big growth plans for this year in Canada.
The 100 per cent channel friendly, Bochum, Germany-based company was founded in 1985 and just celebrated its 25th year in business last year.
Although it does business in more than 80 countries in 20 different languages around the world, most of G-Data’s business today comes from Europe and Asia, Gary Sidhu, vice-president of sales and marketing, North America for G-Data, said.
However, since entering the North America market last year, Sidhu said the customer and partner markets here have also rapidly accelerated.
“When I started with G-Data in March of 2010, (G-Data) never really broke out into the U.S. market,” Sidhu said. “I left SAP (as an inside account executive) to join G-Data in what was a bit of a leap of faith at first. But since then, we’ve been putting infrastructure together so we can focus purely on the customer service side of things.”
To do this, Sidhu said G-Data launched a free 24/7/365 U.S.-based helpdesk for home and office users that’s located in its North American headquarters office in Durham, N.C.
The company’s security solutions address the needs of home users all the way up to large sized enterprises, Sidhu said. Its solutions for home users include anti-virus and Internet security, and for business users, it includes: anti-virus, mail security, client security and endpoint protection solutions.
“The amount of purchases we’ve had (in North America) has blown us away,” Sidhu said. “My biggest goal is to make sure we have a channel to be able to support that.”
G-Data currently has about 20 partners in North America, five of which are from Canada, Sidhu said. Through word of mouth and interest peaking about the company, he said on average, the company gets in 11-12 partner requests a week.
“In Canada, we’re aiming to have at least 40 partners in Canada and 160 in the U.S.,” he said. “We’re looking for a full range of partners. Initially, we’ll have our partners all be on a level playing field on a single partner level because it’s unfair to assign targets to them seeing as we just broke into the North American market Then in the summer of 2012, we’ll look back on the previous year and start establishing different partner levels.”
The company is also in the midst of setting up a couple distribution resources to fulfill its North American requirements, Sidhu said.
What makes G-Data’s solutions unique in the market place is that they use dual engine scanning which enables a 97-98 per cent detection rate throughout and doesn’t bog down the machine, Sidhu said.
Partners can receive double digit margins on G-Data software solutions and also have access to marketing dollars from the company which they can then use to market themselves.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
