GFI Software has added CoreTech to its UK&I distribution line-up as it looks to “energise” its UK channel.
The SMB software specialist has handed CoreTech control of around 150 of its UK resellers and MSPs amid a change in its local distribution strategy.
Centred on GFI’s KerioControl and KerioConnect products, the business involved is worth around £500,000 annually.
The two firms already have a successful relationship in CoreTech’s native Italy, which they are now looking to replicate here.
“We want to energise the UK market with CoreTech as a new distributor,” Jozef Kacala, VP of Global Sales Engineering at GFI, told IT Channel Oxygen.
“Considering everything they are equipped with, we feel CoreTech can push the UK market forwards so we can be even more successful than we currently are.”
Spreading the word
GFI will draw on CoreTech’s marketing prowess to spread the word on lucrative cross-sell opportunities within its enlarged portfolio, Kacala said.
At the centre of this is GFI AppManager, a cloud-based platform designed to enable MSPs to manage all their products and accounts from a single screen.
Launched in February 2023, it sits above GFI’s suite of SMB-focused security, communication and network software products, and is free for MSPs to use.
“As a vendor, GFI will get much more attention from CoreTech,” Kacala said.
“Their marketing will keep the entire channel informed on the things we’re excited about. We know from Italy how good they are at that, and we want to deliver that same efficiency in the UK and Ireland.
“AppManager is the most important product we have in the portfolio, as it serves as a single pane of glass for all products.
“Some GFI resellers are only selling KerioControl or KerioConnect, while others are just selling the GFI products. They may know about the rest of the portfolio, but they don’t know how they cross-collaborate.
“It’s a different story if they’re all under one roof [with AppManager]. If, for example, they’re using KerioConnect, which is a mail server, they can see that they can potentially upsell to Archiver, which is an archiving solution.”
AppManager’s status as an open platform is a key point of differentiation, Kacala added.
“MSPs can take any product they are using and add it to AppManager, so eventually it can be a single pane of glass for everything they have,” he explained.
“Huge” for CoreTech
The partnership is Milan-headquartered CoreTech’s fourth and largest UK vendor signing as it continues to ramp up its distribution business here.
GFI will slot into CoreTech’s UK distribution portfolio alongside TuxCare, MailStore and TSplus Software.
CoreTech UK Country Manager Marino Vigliotti characterised the signing as “huge for CoreTech”, adding that his mission is to raise awareness of GFI’s full product set.
“Vendors sometimes don’t get the focus they need at the big distributors, unless they are at the very top level,” he said.
“GFI has been launching products, but the market doesn’t necessarily know about them because they’ve not been promoted.
“This is why we need to revive, energise and expand the market for GFI.
“For us, GFI is a major vendor. We will be firing all the pistons to ensure we’re not just retaining the MSPs, but expanding what they offer.”
GFI partners can also draw on CoreTech’s white-label cloud infrastructure offering, Vigliotti stressed.
“If you think about where the distribution market is moving, it’s now about distribution-plus-cloud,” he said.
“Other distributors are redistributing the big datacentres. But we have our own cloud infrastructure, which is almost unique.”
CoreTech is “well equipped with using our products both on-premise and in the cloud”, Kacala said.
“They provide a different level of support, which not every distributor is capable of producing,” he concluded.
This article was produced in association with CoreTech and is classified as partner content. What is partner content? See more here.
