Workshare boosts channel support

Document integrity applications vendor Workshare has added extra channel support to maintain the 400 percent revenue growth the company reported for its first year in Australia.

Andrew Pearson, Asia-Pacific general manager for Workshare, said the vendor had doubled its turnover every quarter since it began operating in Australia late last year and wanted to maintain that momentum.

"Asia is the fastest growing region for our company right now, and Australia is the leading light in that," he said.

Australian revenue had grown to US$1.5 million since about October, when it officially started operations here, making for an approximate 400 percent growth rate for its first year, Pearson said.

Workshare was boosting its channel as a result. It had hired former Sophos channel manager and Trend Micro staffer Sandeep Joshi as channel sales manager. Joshi would manage Workshare's sales and partners from the Sydney office, Pearson said.

The vendor was also seeking new partners. It would continue with early signatory Alphawest but wanted five to 10 partners around Australia, focusing on different verticals and regions, Pearson said.

Workshare was also boosting pre- and post-sales support to its channel in what Pearson said would be "a fully fledged partner VAR-based model", a move that would be led by Joshi.

"We're really trying to expand the channel," Pearson said. "But we're interested in the quality of the partnerships."

The vendor had also appointed a new Asia-Pacific technical director, Simon Foster, who would also be based in Sydney, Pearson said.

Meanwhile, Workshare was transferring Andy Ng from its London office to Hong Kong to take up a Asia-Pacific technical account manager role.

Pearson said demand for document integrity and document security applications would go on increasing. Less than 10 percent of people were as yet aware of the risk to business from insecure document management practices, he suggested.

"We found in research that issues around bad metadata -- [such as] data hidden around Microsoft word documentation -- is not really a well known issue," he said.

Documents of various formats were increasingly moved around and in and out of organisations. As exposure to a larger number of people both inside and outside a business went up, so did the chance that some important information might be inadvertently -- or even deliberately -- leaked, he said.

Workshare had been collaborating on a website, www.metadatarisk.org, that promoted issues around document security. That website had just been launched at the time of writing, Pearson said.