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.
The vendors say so themselves. Palo Alto Networks has named it its authorised global training partner of the year for the JAPAC region eleven years running. F5 named it best performing authorised training centre for Australia, the Pacific, China and Japan for 2022, having already given it a best-ATC award for 2020/21. Fortinet named it ATC partner of the year for APAC in 2026, a category awarded to whichever training centre has taught the most people. Check Point made it platinum elite partner of the year in 2024; Nutanix gave it a quality award for the same period; AlgoSec made it the sole training provider for the SAARC region.
Read together those are not decorations. They are the same judgement made independently by companies that compete with each other, about a supplier none of them owns, and the criteria differ enough to be informative: Fortinet counted students taught, Nutanix counted quality scores, F5 counted performance across a region. A training company that satisfies all three is being measured on volume, on satisfaction and on coverage at once.
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 - Palo Alto Networks Authorised Global Training Partner of the Year 2024 for JAPAC, the eleventh consecutive year the company has held the title; the 2023 announcement records the tenth
- Fortinet Training Institute 2026 ATC Awards - Red Education named ATC Partner of the Year for APAC, announced May 2026; the category recognises the authorised training centre that has trained the largest number of individuals on Fortinet technologies
- Red Education F5 pages - Best Performing ATC for APCJ, covering Australia, the Pacific, China and Japan, awarded by F5 for 2022; the company also records a best F5 ATC award for 2020/21 and a 98 per cent customer satisfaction rating on its F5 practice
- Red Education announcements - Check Point named the company its Platinum Elite ATC Partner of the Year, announced 2 February 2024; Nutanix awarded Highest Quality APAC Authorized Training Partner of the Year for fiscal 2023 on consistent quality scores; the company was also named sole Authorised Training Provider for AlgoSec across the SAARC region
- Red Education - named a global authorised training partner by Extreme Networks; the same announcement records more than 80 instructors across multiple regions and time zones, an NPS of 84 and a 98 per cent customer satisfaction rating
- Red Education awards page - winner in the 2024 International Business Awards for Achievement in Corporate Social Responsibility, and in the Cybersecurity Solution category for a submission on closing the skills gap
PRIME recalled an Avaya recognition. Red Education is a Global Authorised Training Partner for Avaya and delivers the full Avaya course range, but NO Avaya award was found in this search - only the partnership and course delivery. Recorded as absent rather than assumed.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.