Nidal Othaman, the Managing Director of StarLink, speaks to Channel Post, about his company, the products and solutions it deals in, its channel community and the way forward for 2014
Tell us something about your company. The profile, number of partners and so on?
StarLink, is a leading IT compliance and next-generation threat driven solutions provider, recognized as a “Trusted Security Advisor”, a true Value Added Distributor. StarLink today is present in 14 countries across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa regions with physical resources in each of these countries.
The on-the-ground teams in each country offer sales, pre-sales and post-sales services across all products in StarLink’s portfolio to the channel in that country, as is required by partners.
There are 3 types of partners that StarLink works with and they are defined as Strategic Partners, Partners and Resellers. The Strategic Partners are those that align very closely with us for multiple solutions within our portfolio and commit to revenue, as well as, invest in growing the business by allocating dedicated sales and technical resources to the partnership.
They are essentially security focused large system integrators. Secondly, Partners are usually security-focused VARs and security service providers that align with StarLink on one or more technologies, but do not usually commit to revenue goals and have a limited pool of resources to share across all vendors and distributors they work with.
Lastly, the Reseller category covers organizations that are typically opportunistic and do not align on any specific technology area with StarLink, but maintain ad-hoc purchase relationships with us and they come to us when they identify opportunities in which StarLink’s products are required.
So although StarLink is a 100% partner-driven organization, this trusted advisor customer-centric approach is used in order to create opportunities for partners while simultaneously training and enabling the channel so that partners can go-to-market themselves. This significantly assists Partners to realise a quick return on investment when selling StarLink’s technologies, as they almost immediately start receiving qualified opportunities and are guaranteed opportunity protection when they align with StarLink.
What markets are you currently present in?
Currently StarLink operates in Middle East Africa and Turkey markets and targets core verticals like the banking and finance, telco, oil and gas, healthcare, education and high-profile government entities within those markets. In near future, we would also be looking into expanding to various other geographies by the end of 2014.
What products, brands and services do you represent and offer in the markets you are present in?
StarLink has a well-structured model of managing its portfolio of 18 vendors with its presence in Middle East, Africa and Turkey region. StarLink has classified its vendors on the basis of Core, Emerging, and Growth categories. The core category includes vendors like IBM Infosphere, Guardium, Dell Software, FireEye, SafeNet and Tripwire as these vendors have been in the region for several years now and are doing a multi- million dollar business.
Vendors like Boole Server, Guidance Software, IronKey, Gigamon, BlueCoat, Titus, MobileIron which have been in the market for couple of years form the emerging solutions category and under the growth solutions category new technology vendors like Bit9, CoreSecurity, IpSwitch, RedSeal Networks, and Venafi are grouped.
This year StarLink has also categories its solution portfolio into four areas like access control, advanced threat protection, vulnerability management, and secure mobility, as a go to market strategy, where it provides and easy approach for partners to sell to their customer base by segregating StarLink’s portfolio of vendors.
What is the workforce strength of your organization?
StarLink was founded in 2005 and since then the company has expanded its strength from two to 100 plus employees spanning across 14 countries as a niche IT security Value Added Distributor.
Our team consistently pushes value added services to the regional channels like PR and communications, events, telemarketing, email campaigns, focused workshops, direct sales engagements alongside partners, technical presentations, product demonstrations, providing demo equipment, POC deployment, implementation, L1 support, L2 support. Of course all are optional but are available to the entire channel, and are selected by the channel based on their need.
What is the annual turnover of the company?
StarLink currently stands as more than $50 million turnover in business. In 2015 we would successfully complete our 10 years in business. Our initial target was achieve $100 million turnover, but we are confident, we should touch a benchmark of $75 million in revenue by 2015.
What are your market strategies for year 2014?
As 2014 would be a part of The Year of the Channel initiative, we have recently introduced the “StarLink Choice” Partner incentive program which was launched last month at the StarLink Partner Conference held in January 2014. The program was essentially put in place for Strategic Partners to Facilitate Partner revenue growth, improve partner commitment, differentiate partner services, secure partner ROI, challenge competition, reward performers and celebrate partner success.
The program is structured in a way that it provides companies with quarterly rebates based on revenue target achievements. It also provides partners the ability to increase profitability by getting increased rebate amounts for selling newer products vs. more established products. Individual partner sales personnel are also compensated a as part of this program by providing them with quarterly SPIFFs.
Do you plan to add any new service, product or brand to your portfolio?
Because StarLink only focuses on niche compliance-focused and next-generation technologies, we would only get in niche technology vendors into the region and evangelize their technology through direct customer engagement, in order to develop opportunities for Partners in parallel to penetrating the market to rapidly gain market share, all while developing the channel for new vendors.
Do you plan to add new channel partners to your channel community this year?
We constantly look to extend our channel with the right focused partners, and evaluate our entire channel quarterly. Today we maintain approximately 100 partners (Strategic Partners and Partners) across the Middle East, Turkey and Africa regions, with 55 of them being in the Middle East.
As mentioned earlier, there are many additional Resellers as well but there is no strategy at the moment for managing them since they operate opportunistically, but speaking about the total channel partners we would look to have ideally by the end of 2014, the number would be around 200 plus.
