Yashaan Cooper, Managing Director for the Middle East, Africa and India at Galaxkey talks with Security MEA about how the company has evolved over the years and now with new products ready to hit the market, the company is looking to grow at a high pace.
When did Galaxkey decided to enter the Middle East region and since then how has the journey been?
Galaxkey started its operations in the year 2016 in the Middle East & Africa and since then the region has shaped up well. And, today the region stands to be among the prime markets for the company, worldwide.
Middle East is an emerging market when it comes to data privacy and data security. Our research has shown that in terms of maturity levels, Middle East tops when it comes to data residency requirements. All major corporations in Middle East are focusing on implementing solutions where they can secure their data in their own infrastructure and have complete control of their encryption keys. Although the market and demand are high, our leadership team is in full support of the sales and marketing strategy using the channel, that has been adopted by the Middle East operations.
From humble beginings with just one employee in 2017, today we are a strong team of six specialists in the region and supported well from the teams based in India and UK as well.
How would you define the usage of your technology?
The company is a firm believer of making its impact in the space of providing holistic data security in the region. With more and more compliances coming in by the day and with digitalization taking over the world, organizations are looking to securely store and share their data with ownership and control over it.
With regulations such as UAE going paperless – our offerings of secure digital and electronic signing of documents has been a major use-case for clients who have integrated their workflow and sign over 2000 documents a month. It saves them the effort of printing, scanning, and couriering the document while of course, the confidentiality, integrity and availability is easier maintained through our platform. We hope that we are more visible to clients through our partners across regions where such regulations need not worry clients as they would simply know that they can reach out to us and we shall solve their needs with multiple other offerings in that single platform – best return of investment.
How do Galaxkey serves the customers?
Galaxkey is not only a point solution or a single use case solving product. We are a platform that help organisations to securely store and securely share – any kind of data (no limitation on data size or data type), with end-to-end encryption, based on authorised identity access. Everyone talks about having a one stop shop to manage their data security needs and we firmly believe with the diverse unified and modular portfolio of Galaxkey, it can be that platform what organisations would need.
While data security is not new, Galaxkey has changed the way we secure it – the ease of use with top notch security – sets us apart from any run of the mill product in the region. As a matter of fact, we believe we are ahead of our competition by many months. Every technology has its unique strength and Galaxkey can complement any of them to work in tandem and increase the data security maturity for the organisations. Partners are well enabled as we treat them as our extended team, and we always work with utmost transparency. Our sales cycles are not lengthy and rewards for partners and customers are many for choosing the platform.
How is the company planning to increase its footprint in the region?
We are very focused on building a channel-based approach and reach out to more and more partners who can carry our product on their portfolio. We see a need to participate in cybersecurity focused events – such as GITEX and GISEC to gain more eyeballs on the company to be known for what we have to offer. We are increasing our digital footprint as well through blogs, newsletters and nothing works better than word of mouth – which has helped us come a long way in good faith.
Last year, we started with GITEX despite the Covid skepticism, but it fetched us good results. This year also we are exhibiting with our distributor. Apart from GITEX, the year has been busy with roadshows that we did in alignment with our partners across the region. We are also having our own events such as LEAP held in the UK (Leadership Engagement and Advisory Program) which was a huge success.
What is the roadmap for Galaxkey in the region?
Data protection is a broad category when it comes to implementation. Galaxkey is the only company which provides one platform to secure emails, files, and electronic signatures. With businesses moving towards instant messaging, Galaxkey is soon launching its own secure instant messaging platform called LockChat. LockChat provides a distributed architecture where the corporates can implement their own in-house servers to manage the flow of instant messages which are encrypted end-to-end. With these five products, Galaxkey is still a niche product.
We are entering into a scalability model where all the five products will provide detailed data protection analytics to corporate administrators to better protect their data. Galaxkey has also implemented AI to proactively protect data based on the sector needs and provide compliance readiness capabilities. By 2022 Q4, we will be launching our Shield platform for corporates to get a centralised dashboard view of all their data protection being done by Galaxkey for emails, files, electronics signatures, and instant messaging.
What kind of growth is it looking to achieve by the end of this financial year?
The company has come a long way, since we began our journey in the region and today, we expect to grow the business in the Middle East by over 40%, after experiencing year on year 30% growth both in 2020 and 2021 despite Covid.