Allot Adds Channel Chief

Larry Schmidt joined Allot this week as vice president of channel sales for North America, a newly created position in which Schmidt will be responsible for the company's partnerships with VARs, systems integrators and distributors in the United States and Canada, said PG Narayanan, CEO for Allot Americas, Eden Prairie, Minn.

"We've always sold through the channel, but now it's more important. We're growing, we have lots of sales people in the field and we need a more focused approach," Narayanan said.

Schmidt is a channel veteran, having served as executive vice president of direct solutions at Norstan, a $225 million communications solution provider based in Minneapolis.

"What partners should expect is continued and, perhaps, even an increased focus on the types of support we're providing them from a sales and marketing perspective and increased demand generation," Schmidt said. "And partners can look for the opportunity to participate in the growth we're going to take this company through."

The company is also recruiting new channel partners to bolster its current ranks of about 100 North American solution providers.

"We're finding that demand for our solutions is growing exponentially, and we have to continue to focus on bringing on new partners to meet the demand," Schmidt said.

Allot's enterprise products include the NetReality line of traffic management devices. Currently, about half of the privately held company's North American sales go through partners, a figure that hopefully will grow as the vendor's overall sales grow, Narayanan said.