SonicWALL partners with Redington Gulf to secure Kingdom of Saudi Arabia channel

The announcement comes as part of SonicWALL's regional expansion plan.

The terms of the deal call for Redington to distribute SonicWALL's full product portfolio utilizing its extensive reseller network. The company will also drive awareness, ensure availability and facilitate adoption of SonicWALL's Universal Threat Management (UTM) capabilities. Redington Gulf has three offices in the Kingdom, in Riyadh, Jeddah and Khobar, staffed with 50 employees and a network of over 500 resellers and systems integrators.

"The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is obviously an essential market for SonicWALL products and service. We believe that enterprises of all sizes there will benefit from the stronger presence we have set in place through Redington Gulf who will provide in country product supply and after sales services," said Antony Chapman, senior director, APAC/MEA at SonicWALL.

"Internet threats don't discriminate between the scale of the network they attack, and we believe that everyone should have access to the best network protection. We have therefore made our Universal Threat Management (UTM) capabilities affordable, powerful and available to all our customers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, regardless of the size of their business," he continued.

According to SonicWALL's distribution network, Redington Gulf will cover the entire geography of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Redington Gulf will work with SonicWALL appointed reseller partners to support and develop their capabilities to better serve their customers. The reseller partners will be trained and certified by SonicWALL as they will be the first line of support to the end customers. The certified engineers at resellers will have Level-2 and Level-3 support access via the Redington Gulf.

"SonicWALL's UTM philosophy and technology prowess have proved beneficial to companies operating in different economic sectors. Our partnership with SonicWALL will expose the solutions in a more strategic fashion in KSA due to our deep channel penetration in the country,"

said Raj Shankar, Director of Redington Gulf FZE.

Commencing operations in 1997, with their head office in the UAE, Redington Gulf FZE currently has country offices located at UAE, KSA, Iran and Egypt with a formidable team of over 100 qualified and experienced professionals managing these offices. With an annual sales turnover of AED 1.8 billion (US$ 490 million), 18 percent of which is generated in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the company aims at increasing its market share and expanding its reach in the Middle East through more in country offices.

As one of the region's leading IT distributors, Redington covers 33 countries across the Middle East and Africa. With offices in Jeddah, Riyadh and Khobar, Redington has one of the Kingdom's largest networks and guarantees next day delivery of 3Com products anywhere in the country.

SonicWALL provides network security, secure remote access, email security and continuous data protection solutions through its worldwide channel network. SonicWALL holds leading market share positions in a number of key markets including Unified Threat Management (UTM) security appliances worldwide, where the company has led for the past four quarters, according to IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Security Appliance Tracker, and SSL-VPN gateway appliances, according to Infonetics Research. The company delivers zero day gateway anti-virus and intrusion prevention signatures to its subscribers to defend against attacks and exploits based on the WMF remote code execution vulnerability.