country-bob->"...why bother offering it unless it meets what...

country-bob->"...why bother offering it unless it meets what appear to be extremely high standards for their myriad of other offerings."

Here is my take on how selling through the channel works. It is a bit subjective and a bit of a ramble.

Blue Tech Inc claim to be partners with over 1,000 suppliers, including plenty of big name companies with product ranges numbering into the hundreds. It is fair to assume that Blue Tech are therefore suppliers of tens of thousands of different products. They are a relatively small company. Their Linked In profile says 35 employees, which is not going to be accurate, but they clearly do not have a sales force of many hundreds.

So, in that light, how much do you think those sales people know about the products they are selling? Highly vertical, specialist vendors excepted, most vendors do not do a comprehensive review of all the thousands of products they have available, or try to learn which ones are good and which are not. These are sales people, not technicians. And that is fine because they do not need be technicians, because that is not how the industry works.

Most ICT resellers do not do a great deal of pro-active "pushing". Generally, their role is networking and establishing and maintaining relationships with client companies, such that when the client needs something, the vendor gets a call and hence a chance to tender.

If a client knows exactly what they want, they will call the vendor and ask for it. "Quote me for 50 more Microsoft Exchange user licences and 2 more CPU licences." If the client is not so sure of what they want, they might say "I need a new database server, what do you recommend?" At that point the vendor will recommend their preferred or most profitable solution.

Herein we see iWebGate's problem. Firstly, client companies, in the US government or elsewhere, are very unlikely to ask for iWebGate by name. The chance for that play would have been a targeted marketing blitz back in 2010 when they won the Global Security Challenge.

Secondly, client companies are unlikely to go to a vendor and describe a requirement for a product which fits the iWebGate product line. Getting companies to think about security is hard enough, but iWebGate's portfolio has something of a scatter gun approach and it is hard to identify exactly what it does. "Hello vendor, I need a product which will segregate my networks, via means of multi-tenant aware proxies, gateways and emulated network services, and which integrates a VPN replacement technology with a cloud, mobile and bring your own device sort of approach to implement anything-as-a-service. Do you have such a product?" Most security products sold thought the channel are much more easily defined.

None of this has a great deal to do with product quality. That issue comes to the fore later. The answer to your question is that generalist channel vendors initially do not really know if a new product is good or bad. They take the opportunity to get some sales in, and protect their reputation by responding to client feedback on systems they sell.