Wick Hill anti-virus deal to offer five year upfront payments

Security-focused disti Wick Hill has signed an agreement with GFI Software to offer its VIPRE endpoint protection software with a five-year upfront payment to resellers. The deal with GFI puts VIPRE in direct competition with Kaspersky within the Wick Hill portfolio.
“We’re achieving high growth with Kaspersky Lab solutions and we expect to continue to grow and expand with them,” explains Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick. “Kaspersky has a strong focus around virtualisation and mobile security, which are also high growth areas in security.
“We’ve taken on GFI VIPRE because the whole area is a growth market for us, and VIPRE has some different elements in its proposition, both in terms of its technology approach and in the lifetime licensing feature, which is attractive to some resellers, particularly in the SME space. So we see clear differentiation between the two solutions.”
Resellers receive all the licence money up front, equivalent to just over five years. According to Kilpatrick, there’s an administrative benefit as well as financial, as resellers don’t have to keep going through the renewal procedure, especially if it's just a low value licence. The licence is good for two machines, so if a machine expires after a year, the licence can be transferred to another laptop or desktop machine.
Outgoing distributor Exclusive Networks will hand over its VIPRE business to Wick Hill forthwith.