Websense hails A/NZ growth

Websense has expanded its headcount and revenue figures across Australia and New Zealand.

The vendor has outlined plans to continue building out its operations in the region and will provide new service opportunities for partners during 2007.

This week the firm added three new Australian employees with Gareth Davies moving from Websense’s UK office to take up the role of territory manager for Websense in WA and New Zealand. While Steven Gross has been appointed systems engineer, Northern Region, and Thomas Lavery has been appointed territory manager, Northern Region.

Joel Camissar, country manager for Australia and New Zealand at Websense, told CRN, Websense had achieved growth at several times the market average for the fiscal year 2006.

“This growth is predominantly coming from the enterprise segment of the marketplace,” he said. “We have almost tripled our headcount over the last year to enable us to expand our presence with new offices in Sydney and Melbourne, and a more focused national coverage.”

Camissar said Websense has a two-tier channel model with itX as its single national distributor and a range of accredited partners underneath.

“We will be focusing more strongly on enabling our partners to increase the services opportunity with Websense. We will also expand our national sales and technical certification program over the coming months.”

Camissar explained that as threats become more sophisticated, traditional technologies like anti-virus (AV) are increasingly powerless to protect organisations.

“In their 2006 Computer Crime Survey published in May 2006, AusCert commented that 60 percent of all new trojan horses at the time of release are not detectable by AV technologies.”

Camissar said Websense security labs offers an alternative approach through proactively mining over 85 million Internet sites every day finding new threats that traditional AV has not yet detected.

“The channel can show this to customers by a Websense risk assessment to demonstrate in real time the additional threats that Websense discovers in their environment,” added Camissar.

securitytrevor treharnewebsense