Vendor lineage
Red Education
Training is distributed the same way products are, and this is what that looks like.
Daniel Storey was working at F5 Networks when they offered him a training role. He took it, spent a period delivering technical training across Asia Pacific, and concluded there was a business in doing it properly. Red Education was founded in Sydney in 2005. By its own account F5 was its first vendor and, at the start, its only one. Twenty years later it delivers vendor-accredited training across Asia Pacific, the Americas, Europe, India and the Middle East, and reports having passed 100,000 training seats.
**The structural point is the one worth taking, and this timeline has been circling it for weeks.** A vendor does not want to run a training operation in every country it sells into. Certifying instructors, maintaining lab equipment, scheduling classes in the right timezone and language, and doing it at a quality that reflects on the brand is a business in itself - and it is not the business of building the product. So vendors authorise partners to do it, on much the same logic that leads them to authorise distributors to hold stock and extend credit.
**Training is distributed. Once you see that, the shape of the industry makes more sense**: an authorised training company is to a vendor's courseware roughly what a distributor is to its hardware, and the vendors it carries appear on its line card in the same way.
The early years are described by the founder as a few boxes of hardware and a heavy flight schedule - the classrooms travelled on planes with the instructor. Growth came as more vendors decided they wanted a partner they could trust to represent them, which is the same trust problem a distributor solves and the same answer.
**The instructor sourcing is the detail that determines whether any of this works.** The company describes its trainers as seasoned practitioners, many of them former vendor or large-customer technical staff. That is not incidental: a course taught by someone who has only ever taught it is a different course from one taught by someone who has run the product in production and been called at three in the morning when it failed. The second kind can answer the question that is not in the material.
The vendor list has grown well beyond F5 - Palo Alto Networks, Cisco, Check Point, Fortinet, Nutanix, AWS, Arista, Red Hat, VMware, AlgoSec, Paessler, EPI and others - and the company has collected the kind of recognition that follows: Check Point named it Authorised Training Company of the Year at CPX 2024 in Bangkok and a Platinum Elite ATC partner, and in 2025 the partnership took a Gold Stevie Award for Global Partnership of the Year.
**Read beside the other training entries here, it completes a set.** CompTIA is certification owned by nobody, defining what competence means across vendors. EPI is a specialist body for one domain. The market-reserve entry shows a whole country's engineering workforce being trained inside protected manufacturers. And this is the fourth model: **independent delivery of somebody else's curriculum, under their authorisation** - which is how most vendor training in most countries actually reaches the person sitting in the room.
- Red Education's own twentieth-anniversary interview with founder Daniel Storey: working at F5 Networks when offered a training role, delivering across Asia Pacific, F5 as the first and only vendor at the start, the early years of boxes of hardware and flight schedules, and growth as more vendors sought a partner to represent them
- Red Education: vendor-accredited training delivered in classrooms, virtually or on site; over 100,000 training seats since 2005; regions across the Americas, Australasia, SAARC, ASEAN and EMEA
- Red Education about page: trainers described as seasoned IT professionals, many former vendor and large-customer technical staff, certified to high levels; lab equipment and materials provided
- CB Insights: founded 2005, headquartered in Sydney, New South Wales; the 2025 Gold Stevie Award for Global Partnership of the Year with Check Point, and a second Gold Stevie for achievement in certification programs
- Red Education on LinkedIn: the vendor list including Palo Alto Networks, F5, Check Point, Nutanix, AWS, AlgoSec, EPI, Paessler, Arista, Fortinet, VMware, Red Hat, ForgeRock and Cisco; Check Point naming it Authorised Training Company of the Year at CPX 2024 in Bangkok
- M&T Resources (2021) and Crunchbase: earlier seat figures of 75,000 and 85,000, which together with the current 100,000+ give the trajectory rather than a single snapshot
Three seat figures from three dates are cited deliberately: a single number would read as a claim, while the sequence shows growth and dates itself.