SMX appoints Australian Country Manager and opens offices in Sydney and Melbourne

Auckland, New Zealand. 15 May 2013. New Zealand-owned cloud email security and hosting company SMX Limited has appointed former Telstra senior executive Mark Wilson to lead a major expansion of its Australian business.

SMX’s vice president of global sales, Tiaan Blaauw, says the appointment, and the opening of offices in Sydney and Melbourne, represent a significant investment by SMX aimed at building a strong partner channel in the Australian market.

“Mark Wilson is a great fit for this role,” Blaauw says. “During more than ten years at Telstra – most recently as general manager of enterprise and government sales for Victoria – Mark has developed particular expertise in managed security services delivered via the cloud model. As head of the enterprise and government market for Telstra in New Zealand he was responsible for Telstra’s DMZ Global business unit, managing a sales team selling a full range of outsourced managed security products – growing DMZ Global revenues by 300 percent over three years.”

Mark Wilson says SMX is well positioned to fill a large gap in the Australian anti-spam and anti-virus market.

“SMX has unique attributes. Firstly it’s designed as a cloud service, with flexibility to be ‘white labeled’, which means system integrators, ISPs and service providers can offer their customers a true cloud-based email security solution under their own brand. Secondly, as all mail filtering is done onshore in Australia and not sent to offshore datacenters for filtering, there is no loss of data sovereignty. Lastly, SMX is already proven in the Australian market – being offered by Fujitsu Cloud Services under Fujitsu’s own brand.

“SMX already has in place sophisticated local hosting capability, which means that resellers can use SMX to compete head to head against Google and Microsoft 365 for customers who want to move their mail servers to the cloud and want to keep their data onshore. Again, the data sovereignty issue is a big factor here, with Google and Microsoft using offshore datacenters. 

“It’s a channel-only play by SMX, so they won’t be out there competing against their partners. And there is a whole raft of other technology-leading features, including highly sophisticated data loss prevention filtering of inbound and outbound mail.

“SMX has had a number of strategic wins in other international markets over the past year. For example,Mitsui Group – Japan’s second largest company – has signed as a market partner in Japan, selling the SMX solution through their specialist IT security division, Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions. So I see great opportunities for SMX in Australia and I’m very keen to help make it happen,” Mark Wilson said.

Released by Sayle Noble & Associates on behalf of SMX Ltd.