Niall King has been appointed Senior Director APAC Sales, with his role split between Centrify’s Silicon Valley head office and Japan.

A fluent Japanese speaker, King says Centrify will place a stronger sales focus on North Asia, with the company’s push into the Asia pacific region following its May announcement that it had raised $42 million in funding from strategic investors including Samsung Ventures, Fortinet and Docomo Capital.

King’s sales experience in Asia Pacific includes starting APAC operations for Cacheflow (now Bluecoat), Neoteris (acquired by Juniper Networks) and Barracuda Networks. Most recently, he worked with early stage startup Pluribus Networks in the software-defined networking area.

King said Australia was important to boosting Centrify’s profile in Asia Pacific. “We’re increasing our office space and team in Brisbane, and we will formalise a partner program for ANZ, both on the reseller/integrator side, as well as with our SaaS partners globally.

“With the acceptance of cloud computing in this region, we expect strong adoption of the Centrify User Suite offering over the next few years, with rapid growth expected across ANZ.

“I’m very familiar with the channel across the APAC region. As Centrify is a 100% channel-focused business, I’m very conscious of the need to build a loyal relationship with partners. We’ll focus on raising awareness of Centrify in ANZ through partner events, lunch and learns, as well as participation in shows and events.”

Centrify unifies and secures identity for organisations, enabling greater end user productivity, improved IT efficiency, better risk mitigation and regulatory compliance, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) of their identity infrastructure.

“What’s driving Centrify’s momentum is the need to get control of passwords,” King said.

“Passwords, password, passwords: We have so many passwords that we need to control from a personal point of view. Corporations require passwords in order to control access to company assets.

“However, managing these passwords has become so chaotic and uncoordinated between groups, divisions, applications and platforms. Add to that the BYOD culture, with a myriad of devices now used to manage and control access to corporate data through Software-as-a-Service and ID-as-a-Service, and it’s no wonder organisations are struggling to control password sprawl.

“Centrify solves that problem, simply and securely. Our cloud offering, the Centrify User Suite, is in the sweet spot here.”