It has opened an Australian office, appointed ACA Pacific as its exclusive distributor in Australia and South East Asia, Nextgen as its New Zealand distributor and is signing up Insentra to provide deployment and consultancy services to UpGuard channel partners in Australia and New Zealand.<\/p>\n
UpGuard was founded in 2012 in the StartMate accelerator at ATP Innovations in the Australian Technology Park in Redfern, Sydney by its now co-CEOs, Mike Baukes and Alan Sharp-Paul.<\/p>\n
UpGuard\u2019s VP APAC Gerry Sillars told Computerworld that UpGuard\u2019s founders had chosen the company\u2019s birthplace for its initial overseas foray. \u201cIt was always the founders\u2019 intent that the first international investment would be in Australia,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
UpGuard moved to Silicon Valley in 2012 after raising US$1.25m in seed capital from Valar Ventures, the investment vehicle of PayPal cofounder, Peter Thiel and others.<\/p>\n
In 2014 it raised US$8.7m in a series A funding round lead by Vivek Mehra of August Capital that included Valar Ventures and Australian investor Square Peg Capital. In August 2016 ScriptRock raised US$17m in a series B funding round co-led by new investor Pellion that included August Capital and Square Peg Capital.<\/p>\n
Australia\u2019s largest general insurer, IAG, also took what UpGuard described at the time as a \u201cstrategic stake\u201d, reported to be 2 per cent, and UpGuard\u2019s Australian office is now in IAG\u2019s premises at 388 George Street Sydney.<\/p>\n
Ron Arnold, general manager of IAG\u2019s venturing team, said IAG had been drawn to UpGuard \u201cprimarily because it has developed a unique response to the growing need for organisations to mitigate cyber risk. \u2026 It also has the potential to help insurance companies like IAG better assess \u2014 and therefore price \u2014 customers\u2019 cyber risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sillars said that UpGuard was building a development group in Sydney. \u201cWe have recruited Daniel Bradbury who used to run the payment platforms at the Commonwealth Bank. He is building out a group that should by the end of the year have about 30 developers focussing on the AI and machine learning component of our product.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sillars added: \u201cThis is not just a sales and marketing investment, it is a strategic investment for us back into our home base. We are looking for the best talent we can find to build the best products we can.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sillars said there were three components to the UpGuard technology designed, respectively, to discover IT assets, control those assets and predict possible cyber security risks.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can discover anything in an environment with an IP address: servers, AS400, storage devices, switches routers, databases etc,\u201d Sillars said. \u201cOnce we understand the environment we take that information into our platform and start applying control measures. If we flag an issue we will integrate with products like ServiceNow or Cherwell or [Atlassian\u2019s] Jira.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe third component is prediction. We do a vulnerability assessment across the environment.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said its founders\u2019 impetus to develop UpGuard had been the visibility problem large organisations face with their IT resources. \u201cBusinesses do not trust the technology. They are unsure of what they have; they have little control over it and cannot predict which parts of it might cause them problems in the future. There biggest challenge is visibility into what they have, so they cannot properly assess risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
On the sales and marketing front, UpGuard announced on 6 March the appointment of ACA Pacific as its exclusive distributor in Australia and South East Asia (excluding New Zealand) saying it had already grown a large customer base in the Asia Pacific region.<\/p>\n
\u201cUpGuard\u2019s products and services will now be available to more than 15,000 resellers across Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia,\u201d the company said.<\/p>\n
This was followed on 22 March by an announcement appointing NextGen as UpGuard\u2019s exclusive NZ distributor. Sillars told Computerworld that UpGuard already had a couple of enterprise customers in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
He described NextGen as \u201ca true value-added distributor\u201d that \u201clooks for technologies they can align with other products and add value to their channel partners.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sillars told\u00a0<\/span>Computerworld<\/em>\u00a0<\/span>that UpGuard was also in the process of signing up Australian firm Insentra to provide professional services deployment and consultancy across Australia and New Zealand. \u201cWe have a 100 per cent channel play so they will work with and the channel,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThey will also help with proof of value and with presales and we will use them on larger accounts to do local technical account management.\u201d<\/p>\n He said Insentra had close to 100 people in Australia and two or three in New Zealand. The company describes itself as \u201ca collaborative IT services partner delivering a range of specialised professional and managed services transacting exclusively through the IT channel,\u201d saying it \u201cfocuses on attaining knowledge and skills in solutions that will best empower the channel.\u201d<\/p>\n This article was first seen on Computerworld here ><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has opened an Australian office, appointed ACA Pacific as its exclusive distributor in Australia and South East Asia, Nextgen as its New Zealand distributor and is signing up Insentra to provide deployment and consultancy services to UpGuard channel partners in Australia and New Zealand. UpGuard was founded in 2012 in the StartMate accelerator at… Continue reading Security specialist UpGuard returns to Australia<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":1645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-secure-workplace","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1644"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1644\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.insentragroup.com\/gb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}