Datacom Systems Looking To TAP Into Channel

Heading the channel push is Chris Koeneman, vice president of sales and marketing, who joined Datacom in July.

Datacom has reseller partners already, but the more formalized channel program, officially launched last week, will include lead generation and a stronger push to recruit new partners, Koeneman told Channelweb.com.

"When I arrived, I said this is a product line that seems ideally suited for the channel," Koeneman said. "It's kind of what I call in the Goldilocks zone, just right for the channel. If you have an overly complicated product, it's difficult for channel partners to learn it and they have to invest a lot of time in doing so. But if you're too simple, the customer will just order it directly."

Datacom, based in East Syracuse, N.Y., focuses on TAPs, aggregation devices and other tools designed to make network access run more smoothly and securely. The company competes primarily with NetOptics and other TAP specialists in the space.

Among recent product announcements, Datacom Systems on Tuesday began offering the 4x16 In-Line Physical Layer Switch, which promises better network monitoring by combining 16 built-in 10/100/1000 Ethernet TAPs with the ability to daisy-chain as many as eight units together. According to Datacom, different enterprise groups, such as troubleshooting and security, can monitor the same links simultaneously without disrupting overall network monitoring.

Datacom's products align with a trend by VARs in recent years toward offering customers more proactive network management through analysis tools, and helping them troubleshoot network problems such as sluggish performance and misdirected traffic. For Koeneman and his team, Datacom Systems' offerings fit nicely into total solutions, they said, because they're still a specialty play.

"I've been in situations before where you find those partners who say, 'I don't really want to go up against Cisco,'" Koeneman said. "But there's no big gorilla in this marketplace -- they're not beating their head against Motorola or Alcatel or Cisco. We need partners because we can only go so far on our own. The only way to scale this is through the channel."

Koeneman joins Datacom Systems after stints at Redline Communications, Colubris (now owned by HP), Avici Systems and Celox Networks. He was also director of service provider sales in EMEA at Cisco.

Koeneman cited increased network speeds -- the transition to 10g Ethernet for example -- as well as more sophisticated use of network access as helping to advance Datacom's product line.

"As customers put different types of systems on their networks, they need more tools to analyze and assess the data on those networks," he said. "There are more and more complex requirements, and the complexity in filtering and aggregation is really what's driving this niche as well as a lot of things in networking right now."