Confidela Broadens Its Channel For Secure Document Management

Company:

Headquarters: Mountain View, Calif.

Technology Sector: Software

Key Product: WatchDox

Year Founded: 2007

Number of Channel Partners: About 20, mostly in the U.S.

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise Focused Solution Provider

Why You Should Care: Confidela's WatchDox Software-as-a-Service application provides a secure way for businesses to manage and share important electronic documents.

The Lowdown: It's an increasingly digital world when it comes to critical documents. Today more contracts, legal documents, product development plans, top-secret research reports and sensitive financial records that were once printed on paper are being created, shared, amended, signed and stored in electronic form. The question is, how do you do all that in a secure way?

Confidela answers the question with WatchDox Virtual Data Room, a document control system that at its core provides the virtual equivalent of a secure room where parties can share documents, discuss and edit them, and sign them. The system tightly controls who can view, print and forward the documents, said Adi Ruppin, vice president of marketing and business development, in an interview. The system sets restrictions on who can access a document, places "watermarks" on them, sets expiration dates, and creates audit trails that detail who viewed a document.

Documents and contracts relating to corporate mergers and business acquisitions, and similar due-diligence scenarios, are currently the main application for the WatchDox Virtual Data Room, Ruppin said. But any sensitive business document -- a pharmaceutical company's marketing plans for a new blockbuster drug, for example -- is a candidate, he said. Last month the company said its newest customers include pharmaceutical, semiconductor and entertainment companies.

Other SaaS applications in the WatchDox suite include WatchDox Publisher for mass distribution of secure documents and WatchDox Business for controlling, tracking and protecting sent documents.

Many of the capabilities offered by Confidela's software can be obtained from other document management systems like EMC Documentum and IBM's Filenet. But Ruppin argues those systems are very complex and more expensive than Confidela's offering.

A number of Confidela's executives, in fact, came from EMC as well as security software developers such as RSA and Check Point Software Technologies. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., and has research and development operations in Tel Aviv, Israel.

While most of Confidela's sales today are direct, the company launched a partner program in November and began recruiting solution providers that want to expand their document security, document publishing, content management and collaboration offerings. Among the program's perks are training and dedicated support, marketing and technical collateral materials, discounts and rebates, and not-for-retail accounts channel partners can use to demonstrate the WatchDox services to prospects.

"I think the potential [for channel sales] is greater than the direct sales," Ruppin said. Some of the 20 or so resellers the company has already enlisted also sell content management applications from competitors, he said.

Confidela is open to working with partners who want to resell the WatchDox applications as their own branded service and own the relationship with the customer, Ruppin said, as well as with those who prefer to leave the selling and support to Confidela and focus on providing consulting and other services around WatchDox.

The vendor also offers a software developer kit and APIs that allow solution providers and ISVs to build the WatchDox services into their own publishing systems and industry-specific applications. "That leaves a lot of room for integrators to add value to our product," Ruppin said. Partners are also developing a significant business integrating WatchDox with Microsoft SharePoint and Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM applications.