Zultys Gets Busy On Channel Front

Zultys last month hired Sean Ooghe as North American director of channel marketing, a new position for the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. Ooghe, who previously served as North American channel sales manager at infrastructure management vendor Cyclades, will report to Zultys President Iain Milnes.

Ooghe will help improve communications between Zultys and its partners and serve as the "direct interface to the channel," said Milnes.

"We have a sales group in the field that supports our local channel partners and we don't sell direct, but we've found that getting information from here out to [partners] is difficult," he said. The company has more than 350 U.S. partners.

Zultys' new distribution partnerships will bring its total number of North American distributors to five, said Milnes. Currently, Zultys works with telephony distributor Computer Telephony Distributing, Greenville, S.C.

"We need to give resellers a choice," Milnes said.

Zultys is also looking to give customers more choices with its new licensing model for software options. Under the new scheme, which became effective January 1, customers can purchase licenses for the exact number of users they require for features such as VPN, fax or the vendor's MXIE presence and instant messaging interface, rather than in blocks of 10 or 25 as under the previous model, Milnes said. Solution providers said they and their customers have been asking for the change.

"If you work with smaller companies, for example, there may not be a need for a block purchase," said Michael Yates, vice president of professional services at Washington Technical, a solution provider in Kirkland, Wash. "A number of our customers have satellite offices where there may be only four employees," he said.

Also, for customers ordering systems that require a large investment in software licenses, a new financing option will let users buy licenses for a fixed number of days and renew them as needed, allowing users to spread out payments for up to 36 months.