Looking back on Workshare in 2007, I once again thank you, our customers and partners, for another great year. I’ve been at Workshare now for three and one-half years and continue to see our community build with a basis of integrity, energy and passion. Amongst us are over 8,000 customers, 300 channels partners, 30 integration and technology partners and 160 employees.
By end of 2007, Workshare became the leading desktop content security vendor in the world with over 3,800 customers on Workshare Professional or Workshare Protect. More importantly, our customer satisfaction and renewals levels both were at a 90%+ rate, a combination first achieved during 2005 and maintained for three years in a row. To improve on our operational reliability, we invested in a global financial system and opened our first co-location data center.
Innovation output during 2007 increased markedly. We released technology for:
- Enhanced PDF handling to compare, review and audit PDF documents
- Enhanced tables comparison for complex straddles, inserts, deletes and moves
- A binary file writing engine for redacting risky content 100x faster than previously
- A content fingerprinting system to protect documents and emails from IP loss
- New network and endpoint channel monitoring for FTP, IM, blackberry, webmail and USB
- Policy-based Incident management workflow to report on information risks
Some news highlights from 2007 include:
- January: Workshare closed its Series B financing, raising $23m in equity capital from global investors Intel, SteelPoint and Quester (now Spark)
- February: Workshare was named one of four private companies to launch with Microsoft in its Office System and Windows Vista worldwide launch
- March: Workshare shipped its WS Ready Partner toolkit, with 12 content security vendors shipping plug and play integrations for Workshare client and server solutions
- April: Gartner listed Workshare as a solution vendor in their magic quadrant report on Content Monitoring & Filtering / Data Leak Prevention
- May: CRN named Workshare one of 10 Emerging Security Vendors to watch
- June: Workshare launched an Online Community to help more than 8,000 customers worldwide communicate and share experiences
- July: Workshare named the worldwide Microsoft ISV/Solutions Partner of the Year at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference
- August: Workshare Professional 5.1 was launched with transparent PDF and Office files document control, solving use cases never before possible
- September: Technolawyer reviewed Workshare Pro 5 with a 4.7 of 5.0 score
- October: Workshare launched the first Unified Content Protection (UCP) Suite combining mobile data protection and data leak prevention in Workshare Protect Suite 6
- December: SC Magazine named Workshare a Reader’s Choice Finalist
New initiatives entering 2008 include:
- Workshare Compare Standard, using the DeltaView engine in modern .NET architecture, was launched in January to give document comparison for small to medium businesses
- Workshare Protect Standard and Workshare Professional are now synchronized with the Workshare Management System for central policy and incident control
- A modern license key management system to better communicate with our customers and to make it easier for customers to buy, renew and gain support
Workshare will continue to build upon its most important assets - customers, partners, employees and technologies. We look forward to improving our relationship with all of you in 2008.
Please feel free to post a comment below or contact me directly if you feel we are missing this strategic goal.