The opening of an Australian office and planned local data centre by email-security giant Mimecast will kick off a concerted campaign to grow the company’s small but loyal local customer base and promote its vision of “information banking”, according to newly appointed country manager Nick Lennon.
Mimecast’s products have been represented in Australia for some time through value-added resellers, who support around 250 multinationals’ local operations as well as “a handful of customers that had made buying decisions from Australia,” Lennon told CSO Australia.
However, with its Southbank, Melbourne office officially opened by Victorian ICT minister Gordon Rich-Phillips and an investment in a local data centre in process, the company is gearing up to significantly expand its position in the next year by taking on up to 25 sales staff to promote its credentials as a full-service provider of email filtering, antivirus, archiving, continuity, file archiving and more.
Whereas Mimecast began life as an early supplier of email-filtering tools, its broader range of related services had combined to create a bigger story around messaging security, governance, archiving and availability, Lennon said.
As an archiver of all or most of an organisation’s critical messaging and data, the company is positioning its solutions as not only an ongoing security barrier, but as an ‘information bank’ that is trusted by customers to look after and enhance the value of their data. It’s also a quick route to disaster recovery: customers can resume operation using the archived information if the primary site is taken offline for any reason.
The company’s solutions are completely hosted in the cloud and delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution that will next year be hosted from an Australian data centre to be determined.
“Ensuring organisations had a simple option for disaster recovery and long-term archiving was one of our core challenges,” he explained.
“In each of the regions Mimecast is focused on – including South Africa, the UK and the US – we recognise there is a need for infrastructure as well as strong support and sales and marketing teams. This will help Australian organisations that are looking for local data jurisdiction.”
With new Australian privacy legislation set to come into effect in March 2014, he said, many organisations will be looking to Mimecast to help bring order and control over their data management.
“Knowing that the data is sitting in a central repository, and it’s got policies around data leakage, search and discovery, will help this focus on privacy,” Lennon said, noting that the company’s capabilities in this area will help with its local brand-building.
“Providing business continuity and high availability is an extension of our gateway,” he said, “as are the ability to manage policy and risks in real time. Yet while we have good referenceability and good projects in certain verticals, we’re not known. That’s the big challenge for us in Australia. A lot of customers will come to us initially for security, and then look to upgrade to other parts of the solution stack we offer.”
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