Enterasys Taps Consortium's Services

The new partnership also will enable Enterasys to tap into the service capabilities 1NService provides through its 15 integrator members, said Rob Savette, president of 1NService, Bellevue, Wash.

"We can deliver a national service footprint for them," Savette said. "With the increasing complexity of [Enterasys'] products, the need for services to be wrapped around these products is critical for success."

1NService was formed in 1998 to provide a forum for networking and sharing of best practices among its membership, enabling solution providers to benefit from each others' expertise.

"You can't support 200 vendors, but in general we're able to support more vendors because the [partner] in Rhode Island has a core competency in three or four things, while the [partner] in California has a core competency in these other three or four things," Savette said.

Jim Harold, vice president of partner sales at Andover, Mass.-based Enterasys, called 1NService "one of the well-kept secrets in the market."

"What makes the match work well is that their members tend to be core networking- [and] security-focused integrators, and they're also very big on services and professional services," Harold said.

The 1NService members that choose to carry Enterasys' product lines—including its Matrix switches, X-Pedition routers and Dragon security products—will participate in fast-track training and join the vendor's channel program at the Gold or Platinum partner levels, Harold said.

Enterasys expects to be up and running with about six 1NService integrators this month, adding more in the first quarter next year, he said.

Enterasys' share of the LAN switching market has been shrinking. The company has lost revenue share year-over-year in each of the first three quarters of this year, according to Synergy Research Group.