Australia's Nextgen Distribution has been selected as the A/NZ distributor for Nominum, a provider of integrated subscriber, network, and security solutions for network operators.

Nominum has so far employed a direct business into the telco space, though Asia-Pacific sales regional director, Carl Braden, said discussions about the enterprise space came up a year ago.

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"I was always bullish about my experiences in touching the large enterprises," he said.

"Why should we just restrict ourselves to carriers when all of these values we have invested in terms of features can be taken to enterprises as well?"

When discussions progressed further, Nominum decided to hire someone with enterprise expertise to explore opportunities in the space.

"We have gone looking for people who are more specialised and unique in terms of understanding of what this market is, rather than just be another tick on the box for another large distribution organisation," Braden said.

At the same time, Nextgen Distribution was looking for a security vendor to add to its portfolio.

"There was a technology requirement from a Nextgen point of view, we thought Nominum fitted into that well, and there was already a personal relationship in place," Nextgen Distribution managing director, John Walters, said.

Long time candidate

Nextgen is a relatively new distributor following its debut about 18 months ago. Walters said prior to that there was another 10 months of development of the strategy and model.

"When we looked at our strategy of enterprise and datacentre only technology, we broke that out into specific bubbles such as networking and security," he said.

"We did all that and got the model right, and then we looked at which vendors would fit into each bubbles."

The strategy paper that Nextgen took to investors and private equity companies to get funding to start Next Gen actually had Nominum listed under the list of vendors in the security section.

"Two years later, here we are," he said.

Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.