InfroTrust's Dane Meah
Managed security service provider, InfoTrust, has named co-founder, Dane Meah, as CEO of the company as it looks to expand its internal staff to 20, up from 12, in the next three months.
The new role was created as a less operational and less sales-focused position to ensure the two year-old company continues to drive innovation.
As reported by ARN, Infotrust was awarded Veritas Specialist Partner of the Year in June and was crowned Symantec APJ Innovation Partner of the Year for Cloud solutions in 2015.
“The idea behind the new role is, as we have grown, we need to have a dedicated visionary role within the business that is not operational, and more thinking about what is happening next,” Meah explained.
“What issues are troubling our customers, and what potential issues lie ahead that they might not have thought of? It’s about being ahead of the curve.”
In the new role, Meah will also be responsible for relationship building, engaging with Infotrust’s key accounts and ensuring that the overall vision of the business is being executed.
“We are in such a dynamic industry, that being able to keep a company secure whilst standing still, is not realistic. In the new role I aim to go and seek out new capabilities into what we take to market in order to deliver on our promise to our customers,” Meah said.
Meah’s colleague and co-founder, Simon McKay, will remain as general manager and will be responsible for the operational side of the business.
Since conception in April 2014, InfoTrust’s growth has been exponential, evidenced by its signing of 300 customers to date, including recent large deals scored with two global insurers and a large bank.
Meah told ARN that he approached McKay to be his business partner whilst working at MessageLabs and then Symantec, after the acquisition in 2008, as he offered a complimentary set of skills.
“The dynamic of our professional relationship across five years was interesting as Simon was the enterprise new business representative who would go and sign new customers, whilst I was an account manager where I ensured the smooth delivery of what was promised,” Meah said.
The idea for InfoTrust sparked as Meah noticed particular insights throughout his career in the security vendor space.
“At Symantec, I found that alot of customers were more interested in purchasing the Cloud product direct and on-premise via a partner,” he said.
“We set the business up to be the first really specialised partners that helps customers implement, but also deliver the on-going managed services. We noticed that as more businesses were moving towards as-a-Service, there was more reliance on SLA platforms back to deliver.”
According to Meah, an initiative that the company has been heavily focused on, is studying a particular industry that is a victim of ICT skills shortages such as local government.
“Local councils are everywhere, not just in CBDs, and this exacerbates the problem, particularly in terms of security as it would be difficult to find a security expert in Broken Hill for example,” he said.
Meah added that InfoTrust tackles this by creating a programmatic way of engaging with these businesses.
“Based on the relationships with some of our clients, we look at the common trends and then drive a partnership with the vendors that we work with and then we will implement it, as they might not have the implementation skills locally.
"After that, we go back on a quarterly basis and recommend the next steps to ensure protection against some of the new types of threats like ransomware or cryptolocker,” he said.
Going forward, Meah said InfoTrust seeks a security practice lead to support in the thought leadership.
