Kordia, which has exclusive New Zealand and Australian distribution rights to security technology developed by Wellington based RedShield, has hired staff in Australia to market RedShield security services and is looking for channel partners.
Kordia executive general manager of sales and marketing Craig Williams, said RedShield has been hugely successful in the New Zealand market and the company was looking to replicate this success in Australia.
Michael Warnock has been appointed country manager for cyber security and Tim Steele, channel manager for cyber security. Both are based out of Kordia’s Sydney office and the company says it will be making more hires over coming months.
Warnock told Computerworld NZ that Kordia hope to announce it first channel partner shortly. “We have an agreement in principle and hope to announce that in the next week,” he said.
He added: “Our focus is to partner with a number of players. We want a telco partner, given their focus on security. The second part of the strategy is to deal with systems integrators that are already delivering security services.”
RedShield co-founder Andy Prow describes the SaaS-based cyber security service as being more “software-with-a-service”, combining web-application shielding software with industry-leading cyber security services.
“The customers we deal with have high value internet facing apps. They are all struggling to keep pace with cyber security threats,” he told Computerworld NZ. “We sit in front of those apps and shield them from vulnerabilities that would take months to fix in the apps themselves.”
RedShield provides protection to known vulnerabilities by default but, Prow says, is very quickly able to implement shielding for vulnerabilities that are unique to a particular customer application and that have been identified by ‘white hat’ hackers or by penetration testing.
“For every customer there is a level of designer shielding and that is where we utterly outstrip the competition,” he told Computerworld NZ.
“One of the reasons we got into this space is that we found vulnerability remediation times were not going down. … Normally we can implement a new shield in minutes. Our hardest shield took us days, because some are quite complex.”
Most of RedShield’s activity at the moment is in New Zealand, Australia, the UK and the US. In the UK the company works through BT, in the US it three partners, including BT Americas.
“The core team of almost 50 developers and security experts is in New Zealand. We have a solutions architect in Melbourne, one in London and a team of eight in the US,” Prow said. Late last year the company raised $6.2m through Series A investment. “That enabled us to expand the team,” Prow said. “The general rule of thumb was to triple the team, double the customers and increase the revenue tenfold. That means moving up the food chain of customer value.”