Exclusive Networks Is Aiming To Be Disruptive, And MSPs Are ‘Interested’

Exclusive Networks is a French distributor focused on security and cloud trying to break into the U.S., and boasts that it is the largest distributor of Fortinet in the world.

Exclusive Networks is breaking into the U.S. as a distributor solely focused on security and cloud, but it has a large international presence and boasts that it is the largest distributor of Fortinet in the world.

The privately held French company, founded in 2003, operates in 62 countries and said it did $2.23 billion in sales last year with 20 percent organic growth. Exclusive Networks employs 1,800 people worldwide and has 13,000 reseller partners worldwide, but fewer than 1,000 in the US.

“Our mission is really to be disruptive,” said Tim Kubiak, vice president of sales, North America, during a presentation at XChange 2019. “If you sit in any cybersecurity SOC ops conversation, you’re hearing how they can’t find the skill set. So we see part of our job and part of our mission is to educate our partners and help them skill up and help augment their own skills and help them outgrow the market and help them out maneuver the competitors.”

Kubiak said its North American line card is small. In addition to Fortinet, the company sells SentinelOne, Rackmount IT, Gigamon, Jask, Infoblox, among others.

“We don’t sell a broad range of things,” Kubiak said. “Part of the reason I chose to come here is I wanted to focus on something very specific, and our staff is all very well trained. Even our sales assistants are sales certified through Fortinet’s NSE (Network Security Expert) program. Everybody in the organization has an understanding of the marketspace as well as their customer’s needs.”

Chris Coluccio, CEO of Techworks Consulting Inc. in Bohemia, New York, were among the roughly 100 MSPs who listened to Kubiak’s presentation. Coluccio said he’s interested in talking to Exclusive Networks about their partners program.

“What we’re looking for are those partners that give us the full breadth of a solution so that we can manage it from beginning to end and don’t try to push their products over our services,” he said. “A lot of other products that we deal with in the industry, their products become more relevant. We want someone who is going to work in that channel and be channel friendly and give us margins. They’re not competing against us on the web or selling products that you can get on CDW or those areas.”

Coluccio said his business is looking at creating a product set with some of the vendors that Exclusive Networks sells to try to see what they can integrate into one model and deliver to customers.

“The other thing I took away from it is we could bring in, without having to change our entire model stack, some of the products that we use into their ecosystem, so that’s important for us to be able to not have to go out and rip and replace everything we have,” he said. “I’m definitely interested.”

Leo Bletnitsky, president of LBA Networking an MSP in Las Vegas said he was interested in talking with Exclusive Networks about other Fortinet products, since they say they are the security vendor’s biggest distributor worldwide.

“I’d never heard of them as a distributor before,” Bletnitsky said. “We don’t do a ton of Fortinet. We are looking at Fortinet to round out our security suite. We currently sell only their phone system, which no one has even heard of.”