Seclore, which is India-based, has been making a large push in the North American market, and while they have been selling direct here, are just beginning to build out a channel. The OEM deal with Citrix is their largest to date, and will add significantly to their exposure, while filling what had been a security gap in ShareFile.
Vishal Gupta, Seclore’s Founder and CEO
LAS VEGAS – At Citrix Synergy here, enterprise digital rights management provider Seclore has announced its first partnership with Citrix, and a significant one it is. Seclore and Citrix have signed an OEM deal in which Seclore will provide its Information Rights Management technology for Citrix ShareFile, filling what had been a gap in the ShareFile security portfolio.
“This is our most significant agreement we have signed to date,” said Vishal Gupta, Seclore’s Founder and CEO. “This gives us direct exposure to 16,000 ShareFile customers, who will get Seclore the next time they upgrade to the latest version. All the product provisioning and licensing has been made extremely easy to obtain and use, and they get a secure collaboration and rights management solution for ShareFile.”
Seclore originated as an academic project within the IIT Bombay tech incubator, where the technology was developed, and eventually led to the formation of the commercial company in 2006.
Lynne Courts, Seclore’s Vice President of Global Marketing
“The premise is that information needs to travel all over to support collaboration, and the issue is how to keep it secure during the collaboration process,” said Lynne Courts, Seclore’s Vice President of Global Marketing. “Our focus is on data-centric security. Ultimately, what matters is the data, and protecting it. It’s the lowest common denominator. Our solution goes down to the level of a Word or spreadsheet file. It lets you put a wrapper around it, and control who can open it and what they can do with that document. You can even control if it can be shown on a camera. And the document owner can revoke the rights at any time. The rights can be associated with a document when the owner mails it, and can be set either ad hoc or by automated policy.”
Courts said that while there have been many other digital rights management solutions on the market, past and present, Seclore’s has some unique characteristics.
“There was an initial wave of solutions, which really weren’t ready for prime time, but which were bought up anyway by larger vendors looking for this kind of solution,” she said. “We won a Garther award for allowing an external user to access a protected document through a browser, so they didn’t have to download anything. We use a very lightweight agent, like in GoToMeeting.”
Courts said that Seclore addresses a key problem for organizations – that file sharing services like ShareFile can lead to data leaving an organization without authorization – and that they allow rights management policy to be defined and enforced by IT, rather than the document owner.
“This is a major change in how rights management is being deployed,” she said. “With Seclore, you are not waiting for the employee to protect document rights by clicking on a document, which the rest of the industry still relies on employees to do.”
Seclore’s sweet spot includes both larger and midsized companies, with a key factor being whether or not the customer’s industry is a regulated one.
“We are especially strong in regulated industries, like banking, insurance, manufacturing and pharmas,” Courts said.
The go-to-market strategy in North America has been mainly direct so far, although they sell through channel partners basically everywhere else, but that is changing, Courts indicated.
“We are just starting to build out our channel over here,” she said. “In addition, while our head offices are still in India, the U.S. market is where we are doubling down. Our recent B Series funding round was all about North American growth.”
The Citrix relationship is brand new for Seclore, who had never worked with the company previously. Seclore’s ability to define granular usage policies and control remote usage, including the ability to change or revoke usage rights even after a document leaves Citrix ShareFile, fills an important security gap for Citrix.
“They had nothing doing this functionality before,” Courts said. “Gartner had pointed out that in enterprise sync and share, this was a huge gap some vendors had, and Citrix was one of them.”
While Seclore has other important partnerships, including IBM, Symantec and Intel Security, Courts said the Citrix relationship goes further.
“The other relationships are more technology partnerships,” she said. “This is an OEM relationship, with Powered by Seclore branding. We ARE Citrix Information Rights Management.”
While ShareFile was very much SMB-focused when Citrix acquired them, Citrix has successfully sold it to a lot of Xen customers, developing its enterprise base.
“A significant part of ShareFile customers are now larger,” Gupta said. “So this increases our exposure to enterprise customers. But even among the mid-market and SMB ShareFile customers who will now get this, this will be a valued solution. The need for secure external collaboration is even higher in the mid-market because their access to best of breed technologies tends to be lesser. They are much more dependent on ‘one size fits all’ solutions.”
