Anthony Daniel (WatchGuard)
Auckland-headquartered Soft Solutions has launched a zero upfront payment, monthly billing firewall subscription service for WatchGuard solutions in New Zealand.
Building on the partnership begun in 2019, Soft Solutions is now the first distributor in New Zealand to offer WatchGuard’s pay-as-you-go subscription billing as part of WatchGuard’s FlexPay program, and the third in A/NZ.
Soft Solutions resellers and their customers can now purchase flexibly to match their requirements and scale services up and down as their business requirements fluctuate.
Chris Fitzgerald, managing director of Soft Solutions, said the concept of monthly billing for software has been with us for a few years but for hardware it’s been a different story.
"More and more enterprises today need flexibility in their technology infrastructure and COVID only accelerated this trend with companies having to provide security for a distributed workforce and handle rapid fluctuations in the number of staff working remotely," he said.
"Businesses simply don’t want to be locked into long-term infrastructure and the new pay-as-you-go service from WatchGuard supports customers in an uncertain business environment and removes risk for resellers who can now offer a flexible billing structure.”
The subscription avoids time-consuming, costly and manual processes for buying up front and traditional fixed-term contracts that limited scalability.
It also eliminates up-front expenses and long-term commitments for hardware, and allows managed security service partners to suspend, activate, reassign and scale security services as customer needs change.
The product portfolio and subscription platform combination would also enable resellers to seek out new business opportunities among customers who have a firewall in place but want to take advantage of some of WatchGuard's new software offerings.
Anthony Daniel, regional director for A/NZ and the Pacific Islands for WatchGuard, said the flexible procurement model built upon the company's partner first strategy, supported companies in their cloud transformation and allowed them to benefit from increased protection and the flexible, scalable IT infrastructure needed to keep pace in business.
