The Seattle, Washington-based security appliance vendor was taken private last year by Vector Capital, and is only now completing its new management team, said Joe Wang, who joined as CEO five and a half months ago. It made its name in U for the SMB market, where it claims market leadership against the likes of SonicWALL and Fortinet with its Edge and Core ranges.
The Peak family of devices, comprising the 5500, 6500 and 8500 boxes, are aimed at the enterprise market and have been around for a while, conceded Wang, but the general malaise afflicting the company in the run-up to and immediately after being taken private has meant that it hasn’t really focused on driving sales in what, for WatchGuard, is a new market segment.
The Core family is the bulk of revenue by value today, said Ian Kirkpatrick, chairman of WatchGuard’s distributor for the UK and Germany, Wick Hill. Peak currently sells primarily as a high-end Core box, but will become more enterprise-focused in its own right, with features such as management consoles, fault tolerance and high availability.
In the short term, Kirkpatrick expects to push more Peak devices into enterprise through the resellers already selling the Edge and Core families, but he acknowledged the need, over time, to add new channel partners that come with an enterprise focus. Wick Hill already has those relationships on behalf of other security vendors such as Imprivata, Finjan and Vasco, he went on, so there should be opportunities to bring some of those resellers into the WatchGuard camp, as the Peak products evolve.
