Opengear, a Digi International company, announced it has achieved 100% growth across Canada, where sales and new deployments have more than doubled since 2017. The company posted similar growth within its channel partner program in Canada, which now accounts for more than 15% of the company's North American resellers.

Opengear's growth has largely been fueled by demand for its Resilience Gateway products that provide smart out-of-band management, failover to cellular, network automation, remote network monitoring and management, and more. These capabilities are essential to delivering robust network reliability and secure remote access to critical devices through a separate management plane, particularly as networks become more robust and geographically disparate.

Industry analysts project IT spending in Canada could reach $91 billion in 2020, of which $4.9 billion would be invested in data center and $11 billion in new devices and hardware.

"Today's networks are becoming increasingly complex, as organizations introduce more new devices and push closer to the edge," said Todd Rychecky, vice president of Americas for Opengear. "This is a growing trend - particularly in Canada, where adoption is rising at an incredible rate. Organizations are recognizing the need for network resilience, and Joel's deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities will be invaluable in supporting our customers and partners."

Opengear also reported a sales increase following the launch of its two new NetOps Console servers earlier this year - the OM1200 and OM2200, the first solutions to bring Smart Out-of-Band management and NetOps automation together in one piece of hardware. A recent study from Opengear found that 95% of North American businesses improved their network reliability after implementing NetOps automation.

Today, many large Canadian organizations rely on Opengear to keep their networks running. These deployments range from a Fortune 500 consumer electronics retailer and a government agency managing Canada's federal IT services, to a global pharmaceutical maker of medicines and vaccinations for pets and livestock and one of Canada's largest financial-services institutions with more than CA$1 trillion in total assets under management.

To help meet the growing demand for network resilience solutions, Opengear has appointed Joel Sheppard regional sales manager for Canada. In this role, Sheppard will lead sales and strategic partnerships throughout the region, while supporting and expanding Opengear's growing roster of channel sales partners.

"I am very excited for the opportunity to help organizations secure their networks and protect their businesses with best-in-class solutions," said Sheppard. "Managing networks has never been more demanding. With the latest strategies and technology from Opengear, organizations can not only keep networks online today, but also future-proof them to meet the challenges of tomorrow."

Sheppard brings nearly a decade of reseller sales experience, having previously worked for CDW and Zones. Most recently he was an enterprise SaaS account executive at NiTorom Inc., a leading infrastructure monitoring provider.