With a new sales chief in place, NetEnrich is looking to build up its presence in Canada.

The company, which has expanded its business over recent months from an outsourced NOC for managed service providers to include a wider range of capabilities – a “from the closet to the cloud” push, as NetEnrich describes it, has introduced Jeff Carr as its new vice president of sales.

And one of Carr’s first priorities is building the NetEnrich name and brand in Canada.

So far, the company has had a small present in Canada, with “a handful of really strong partners.” But Carr, who spent two years in the Toronto area working with Borderware, says he recognizes the opportunity for a much larger business in the Canadian channel.

“I’m familiar with just how robust it is, and we’ll be focusing on Canada and emphasizing growth,” Carr said. “I’m a big proponent of it.”

So far, that includes new sales staff based in Buffalo, NY, who will be tasked with growing the business in Ontario.

The move comes as NetEnrich seeks to enhance its presence in the SMB space, rolling out an SMB managed service that packages the management of a server, its operating system, business applications, Internet connectivity and firewall as well as five workstations with full remote patching and antimalware support into a package price. Solution providers can then add additional products under management and monitoring in chunks of seats or on an a la carte basis.

NetEnrich has also strengthened its connection with distributor Ingram Micro, which is serving as its primary route of getting introduced to SMB-focus managed service providers.

However, even as that program launched in August, NetEnrich GM Justin Crotty said Canada was an under-represented opportunity. “I feel the Canadian market, in terms of MSP growth and activity, lags the U.S. to some degree,” he said in August. “If we had 15 per cent of our business coming from Canada, I would view that as right in line with the size difference between the U.S. and Canada. But we’re not seeing 15 per cent of our business from Canada.”

Carr’s focus on Canada is part of a broader growth strategy, which also includes growing the sales side of the organization very rapidly – with the intent of growing the company’s sales team by 100 per cent in the next six to nine months.

Part of it is that they recognize an inflection point in the market, said Jennifer Anaya, vice president of marketing.

“MSPs are in a prime spot to take on not only the data centre but also the cloud as well, and we’re on a mission to help transform [MSPs] with expanded service portfolios from the data centre to the cloud.

Anaya said that during the company’s last quarter, it saw tremendous growth both in terms of the number of MSPs working with the company, but the scale of those it’s working with, getting interest from larger managed service providers looking at taking on the company’s outsourced IT operations.

“The word’s definitely getting out,” Carr said.