CipherTrust’s strategy is simple yet effective – continue to innovate and redefine the messaging security space in order to stay ahead of competition.

The company has been staying true to this mission. CipherTrust has been endorsed by both Gartner as well as IDC as the market leader in this space for two consecutive years (2004 and 2005).

As part of CipherTrust’s ongoing strategy to provide unified security protection across multiple messaging protocols, the company has revved up its innovative gear mode in the past three months, launching two new gateway security appliances – IronIM and IronNet. IronIM integrates policy management into inbound and outbound threat protection while IronNet enables administrators to integrate common corporate policies and automate enforcement actions across Webmail, instant messaging (IM), peer-to-peer, file transfers, and other HTTP- and FTP-based activity. According to Lawrence Ang, regional sales director, CipherTrust, these two launches marked a milestone for the company as this made them the first vendor to offer gateway security appliances for both email and IM. “In addition, CipherTrust is the only vendor at the moment who offers encryption capabilities for enterprise IM,” says Ang

There is no doubt that the company is steadily gaining traction and a name within the Asia Pacific. CipherTrust set up its APAC operations, based in Hong Kong, slightly more than a year ago. Within six months, the company expanded and now has offices in Australia, China, Japan and Singapore. By November 2005, the APAC staff strength grew close to 20, with more than 60% of them in support roles and 30% in sales roles. They are planning to expand into India early next year.

Ang says that CipherTrust has at least one official partner in each country of South Asia which includes the India Sub-Continent, ASEAN and ANZ. He adds that the first phase of engaging the channels has been completed. The next phase is to define a proper framework of a two-tier model in the major markets, including Australia and Singapore. Under this two-tier approach, CipherTrust will engage distributors and/or direct partners to ensure that all the major e-mail security projects are covered by the large System Integrators (SIs) along with CipherTrust’s support with regards to technical and price issues. The distributors in these countries will also take care of smaller channels targeting the SME markets, in particular, those promoting the S-class product line.

Ang adds that the company is always on the lookout for good SIs in every country. “These SIs must be very focused on CipherTrust’s type of email security as part of the Total Solutions,” he explains. “In fact, some of the company’s initial success in this region can be credited to such SIs, who have been working very closely with us, after we spent time educating them on CipherTrust’s edge over our closest competitors.”

According to Ang, this is a modified channel strategy. He elaborates, “Branding is something that has been missing in CipherTrust IronMail series in this region. There was confusion in the market when one of our competitors gave a product of theirs’ a name beginning with the word “Iron”. In such a scenario, strong and knowledgeable partners are required in order to be able to articulate to both our prospective customers as well as existing customers, exactly who CipherTrust is – that we are the recognized market leader in the Messaging Security space.”

While branding is an issue the company is seriously looking into, there is no doubt though of its commitment to the messaging security space and to its vision of being at the forefront of protecting today’s enterprises across all boundaries of information exchange, strengthening its offerings, ensuring rewarding channel partnerships and continuing to innovate and lead in this arena.