Temprano Techvestors, of Newton, N.C., has acquired Charlestown, Mass.-based value-added distributor and reseller Network Security Group Inc. to help vendors in the European software community promote and sell their products in North America.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Founded in September by SMB channel veteran Luke Walling, Temprano Techvestors helps successful, generally smaller, central and eastern European software vendors that wish to expand overseas but lack the skills or resources to do so on their own market, sell, and support their products in the U.S. and Canada. The company launched its first offering, from Prague-based data loss prevention vendor Safetica, five weeks ago and plans to add 2 to 4 more in the months ahead.
“To simplify purchasing of all these products, particularly by the channel, we need to aggregate them in one place, and we can’t do that under any single one of these brands,” says Walling, who is a former system builder, security solution distributor, and executive at both AVG Technologies N.V. and the company that acquired it in July, Avast Software.
Walling’s original plan was to create a distribution arm for Temprano from scratch, but he ultimately changed his mind.
“It made a lot more sense to accelerate it and make an acquisition,” he says, adding that buying rather than building a firm has the added advantage of providing a ready-made market for Temprano solutions.
“We get a great engaged customer base where we can take these new names, great pieces of technology that are very popular in their home markets or other places in the world, and introduce them with great credibility and trust to people [who] already transact with us,” Walling says.
Network Security Group made an especially attractive acquisition target because its president, Peter Streips, possesses sales talents that the existing Temprano team lacks.
“He’s just a strong sales leader,” Walling says. “He’s excellent with mentoring and coaching sales reps to help them deliver the best possible value to our customers, so we’re quite happy to bring him on board.”
Network Security Group is the first of several distribution buys Walling expects to make.
“We are looking at several others for 2017,” he says. “It’s not something we’ll do this year, but we’d like to see ourselves acquiring at least one more during the course of the next 12 to 18 months.”
Those additional businesses, which will operate collectively under the Network Security Group brand, will offer more than just products from Temprano’s vendor partners.
“There’s a tremendous cross sell, upsell, bundle opportunity with more traditional channel vendors,” Walling says, noting that Streip’s firm has a strong relationship with ESET, the Slovakia-based security solution software maker, that it will continue to maintain.
Though Network Security Group is a VAR as well as VAD, Walling plans to limit the services it provides to the kinds of functions distributors traditionally perform.
“We see our channel as being our conduit to service delivery to end customers,” he says. “We don’t want to become a huge service organization outside of kind of core technical support and pre-sales engineering support.”
According to Walling, Safetica’s DLP solution has been performing well in the market since its North American debut in September.
“Our opportunity flow is substantial,” he says. “We see anywhere from 7 to 10 new opportunities per day flowing into our pipeline.”
Somewhat to his surprise, however, most of those opportunities involve midsize rather than small businesses.
“We are still frankly trying to crack the ‘S’ in SMB with data loss prevention technology,” Walling states. “We believe the channel’s going to do that for us.”
Temprano will introduce another European software product within the next few months. For the moment, Walling will share only hints about what kind of product it will be.
“It’s not a new category, but it’s one where we believe we can disrupt a little bit,” he says, especially as far as channel margins are concerned.
