Strong channel growth drives SMX appointment

Strong channel growth drives SMX senior management appointment

New Zealand cloud email security company SMX has appointed former Renaissance Business Development Manager, Chris Kidd, to the newly-created position of New Zealand Channel Manager responsible for the 110-strong SMX reseller network

During his two-and-a-half years at Renaissance Chris Kidd specialised in networking and security products, developing successful brands such as SonicWall Security, Brocade, Allot, Palo Alto, McAfee and Aspen Optics.

Chris Kidd’s 25-year career in the IT industry began as an engineer at Wang New Zealand. He spent time in the UK with companies including Associated Newspapers, IBM and Johnson Diversey before returning to New Zealand where, prior to Renaissance, he worked in senior networking roles at MIS Services and Network Pro.

Michael Murphy, SMX Sales Manager for Australia and New Zealand, says Chris Kidd’s appointment reflects strong growth in SMX’s reseller channel as New Zealand companies and organisations switch to cloud-based email anti-spam and anti-virus services.

“Chris Kidd makes a strong addition to the SMX team. His experience in both channel management and channel business development will be invaluable as we set our sights on becoming the premier cloud-based email security service provider across New Zealand and Australia,” Murphy says.

Chris Kidd says SMX represents a great opportunity: “I’m pleased to be working with a New Zealand company offering a really outstanding cloud email anti-spam and anti-virus service. It’s a young company going places fast and I’m looking forward to the challenge,” Kidd says.

About SMX
Launched in February 2006, SMX is a privately-owned secure email software development and services company, with global headquarters in Auckland, New Zealand. SMX co-founders Jesse Ball and Thom Hooker lead a sales and development team focused on local and international sales through reseller and licence agreements.

The SMX business model is for customers to be charged a monthly fee, based on the number of users within each customer business. Spam and viruses are cleaned before they reach customer networks with savings in network bandwidth frequently being more than the monthly cost of the service.

Technology innovations include the unique ability to service multiple customers out of a single system (multi-tenanted). No other service-based solution is so easily scalable, and no other is so fast to deploy – taking literally two or three phone calls and less than half a day to fully deploy across the largest organisation.

The SMX service is also designed to be easily ‘white labelled’, which means customers such as Telcos, IT services companies and Internet Service Providers can incorporate the service under their own brands. Another key point of competitive difference is in SMX’s ability to locally deploy infrastructure. Local deployment ensures email is not routed through countries such as the United States, but is scrubbed in the customer’s own country, under local law and jurisdiction.

SMX has a blue chip list of local customers including the Automobile Association, the Accident Compensation Corporation, Harcourts, Christchurch Polytechnic, The Foundation for Research Science and Technology and a number of local government and council organisations.

During 2008 SMX signed an important reseller agreement with India’s largest IT services company, CMC – a subsidiary of the giant Tata Group. CMC now has two data centres up and running to host the SMX service. In early 2010 SMX made its first sale into Japan and launched into Australia, following the opening of an SMX data centre in Melbourne and the signing of a head distributor agreement with Westcon Group, one of Australia’s largest IT distributors.

In mid-2010 SMX signed a reseller agreement with Fujitsu New Zealand through which the SMX cloud based email security service will be offered as part of Fujitsu’s managed services offering in New Zealand.

For more information, please see: www.smxemail.com

ENDS

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