New Professional Services Manager role to facilitate growth
New Professional Services Manager role to facilitate growth
Barry Davies, an experienced IT and Education Manager, has been appointed at value added distributor (VAD) Wick Hill to the new post of Professional Services Manager. His job will be to help maximise and grow Wick Hill’s training and professional services offerings.
The role has been created due to increasing demand from Wick Hill resellers for training courses and professional services, following a period of strong growth at the VAD, with sales en route to exceed US$150 million annually.
Wick Hill Ltd is part of the international Wick Hill Group, based in Woking, Surrey with sister offices in Hamburg. Users of products sourced through Wick Hill include most of the Times Top 1000 companies in addition to many non-commercial organisations, government departments and SMEs across all business sectors. Through its channel partners, the company has delivered IT solutions to more than a million users world-wide.
Davies will be in charge of Wick Hill’s new custom training centre, which will double the company’s previous training capacity. He’ll also be responsible for developing and growing Wick Hill’s technical and consultancy services. These provide channel partners with support in implementing solutions, as well as vendor specific consultancy, to ensure that products are performing optimally.
Davies has an extensive IT industry background, with over 25 years’ experience, working with Microsoft Gold partners, government agencies and blue chip customers. He previously worked for training organisations including Lifetime Training, Pearson in Practice, Global Knowledge and the Information Technology Services Agency (ITSA).
He commented: “I’m very much looking forward to working with staff at Wick Hill to further strengthen training and professional services at the company and provide resellers with more revenue-generating courses and professional services, which they can sell alongside solution sales.”
This appointment is one of a number of new hirings made by Wick Hill as part of a major reorganisation at the company, to accommodate and accelerate its recent growth. The reorganisation also includes extensive office refurbishments to make more space for a significant expansion of the sales area.
The company specialises in solutions from market-leading vendors, which provide significant service opportunities and benefit from Wick Hill’s award-winning support infrastructure, which includes marketing sales and customer support, as well as training and technical services, offering a portfolio that covers security, performance, access, networking, unified communications, high performance wireless, storage, cloud security, visibility and hosted solutions.
The company has a strong focus on gateway and remote access protection, security issues around mobile and wireless devices, and converged voice/data products. The portfolio encompasses a wide range of solutions for fixed, mobile, virtual, wireless and cloud implementations.
World class information security solutions that protect customers from IT threats are provided by technology innovator Kaspersky Lab. These include anti-malware and anti-virus protection for workstations, laptops, file servers, mail servers, Internet gateways and smartphones.
Including Kaspersky Security for Virtualization provides award-winning anti-malware protection for virtualized servers, desktops and data centres.
WatchGuard and Check Point provide firewall/VPN solutions and UTM/XTM appliances, while Barracuda Networks has a powerful website firewall and SSL VPN.
In the field of identity management and access, comprehensive 2-factor strong authentication solutions are available from both VASCO and SafeNet.
Secure storage is provided by Barracuda Networks, with email archiving, data back-up and disaster recovery solutions, plus a tape-free back-up service which provides both local and secure offsite (cloud) storage. Vendor Imation offers secure mobile data storage solutions, which include encrypted flash drives and external hard drives.
Xirrus next generation wireless solutions offer high security, high throughput and high density wireless that can be field upgraded; and WatchGuard provides wireless security through its range of wireless firewalls and UTMXTM solutions, as well as access point integration with its firewall/UTMs/XTMs.
Vendor Threat Track Security delivers the VIPRE Business range, covering endpoint protection, anti-virus and anti-spyware; while spam and spyware protection are available from Barracuda Networks.
Web access, network performance and network management products include solutions from Allot (QOS-based broadband traffic management solutions for intelligent networks), Open Text (remote application access and secure file transer), A10 Networks, (application acceleration, optimisation and security), Xirrus (high security, high performance wireless networks), TIBCO LogLogic (compliance and SIEM) and Barracuda Networks (Internet link balancing/load balancing).
A comprehensive range of security solutions is also available from Becrypt, specialists in cyber security solutions, which includes endpoint security, secure remote working, and enterprise security, with an emphasis on encryption. Guidance Software provides world-leading digital forensics, cyber security and e-discovery solutions
With professional technical and sales accreditation courses being provided for most products, including WatchGuard, Kaspersky Lab, Check Point, Barracuda Networks, Xirrus, Panasonic and Allot. On the consultancy side, Wick Hill can support its channel partners with technical consultancy during the sales process and beyond.
