Member Article

Clearswift builds platform for strong future growth

Following the publication of its latest Annual Review Clearswift, the global cyber-security company, has disclosed its financial and corporate achievements from the past year.

Clearswift has seen a 7% rise in revenue to £20.8 million, 85% revenue visibility, of which 94% is recurring though subscription and maintenance along with a 25% increase in average size of new deals. During this financial year (ending March 2013) Clearswift has seen a 215% increase in EBITDA to £4.7 million.

The appointment of Chief Executive Officer Heath Davies in October 2012, with his strong track record of growing market-leading international technology businesses, strengthened the company’s senior management team. With the backing of the majority shareholders Lyceum Capital, Heath is leading the strategic acquisition programme to complement organic growth plans.

Heath Davies said: “This past year has been about consolidation and re-focusing the business - as a result we now have a strong, global senior management team in place and have refined our focus on specific markets. We have invested significantly in our technology roadmap which has been led by our Senior Vice-President Product, Dr Guy Bunker; this will set apart our offering as it is unveiled in the coming months.”

The demand for enterprise security solutions is being accelerated by the use of mobile and personal devices at work (BYOD) and the storage of data in the cloud meaning that data breaches or leakage is seen as a major operational risk – Gartner estimates that the market for Data Loss Preventation (DLP) will reach £436million this year.

Martin Leuw, Chairman comments: “Enterprises, regardless of sector or size, are rapidly waking up to the risks, as well as the opportunities, that have arisen from the advances in mobile technology. Digital security is now a strategic agenda item as relevant to the Board as it is to the IT Manager. To address this, we are building on Clearswift’s strong heritage in its flexible Policy Engine and Deep Content inspection capabilities, so that organisations have far greater visibility of where their valuable content is going to and who is seeing it”.

Leuw continues: “Clearswift’s vision for the year ahead and beyond is to enable clients to secure their business critical data at all times through the development and provision of industry-leading Information Governance cyber solutions.”

Recently, Clearswift conducted an independent research project ‘The Enemy Within’ in March 2013 to investigate the extent to which internal security threats are affecting UK organisations and how these are being managed. The research produced some surprising results with the top three security threats being human error (87%), lack of awareness/ understanding of IT security practices (82%) and introduction of viruses via personal devices, BYOD (82%). The research is now being extended globally.

During the past year Clearswift has received recognition for both for its products and for the company as an employer: Secure E-Mail Gateway was awarded a 5-Star rating from SC Magazine (September 2012) and the company retained its “One’s To Watch” status for the second year in a row at Best Companies.

Clearswift currently have more than 3000 clients worldwide, with over seven million active licenses, including in the financial sector, government and defence.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Clearswift .