AppGate, a company focused on virtual private networks and security, is shuffling and reorganizing its headquarters and other offices.
The company’s U.S. headquarters will move from Durham to San Jose, CA, where its new world headquarters will also be located. AppGate’s new European headquarters will be in Geneva, Switzerland. Previously, both its worldwide and European headquarters were in Gothenburg, Sweden.
These two cities…San Jose and Geneva…are positioned as “hotbeds” of security technology in both North America and Europe, AppGate says, and will allow it to “better centralize” its sales efforts. The company said the reorganization was due to customer and market demand.
“That really was the main influence,” says Aimee Ridgway, AppGate’s director of marketing. “The board and shareholders looked at the structure, business and market, and based on those things, decided it was not structured properly to hit the market and capitalize on where sales are, and we need to be in those places. It’s a matter of refocusing our resources to these new locations, while still keeping our locations in Durham and Gothenburg.”
AppGate raised $4 million earlier this year in a third-round of venture funding which the company said would be used in part to expand its sales efforts. AppGate raised $10 million in capital in 2001.
Ridgway says the shift in location of AppGate’s headquarters will redefine the Durham office’s role, which will now be to support the company as the “North American Center of Excellence,” primarily housing AppGate’s worldwide centralized engineering division. It also will accommodate sales, support, marketing, product management and worldwide manufacturing divisions.
Similarly, the Gothenburg office will remain as a “Center of Excellence for Support,” serving AppGate’s Scandinavian customer base, as well as the European, Middle Eastern and African customers. Ridgway says some employees from the office would be offered jobs in Durham, while others would be given severance packages. She added that the Durham office, which now employees 15, would also be making some new hires, although how many depends on sales.
Furthermore, AppGate’s London office will become a “Center of Excellence for Sales and Support,” and two new sales offices will open in France and Germany due to European sales demand. The company, which employees 43 people worldwide, says it will be aggressively building out its United Kingdom locale as well.
While neither of the two new headquarters is operational yet, Ridgway said it would be “sooner rather than later.” The company’s top executives will all be based in San Jose, including CEO Alfred Moresi, who currently resides in Denver and splits time between Sweden and Durham. Two other executives, VP of North American Sales Sam Kumarsamy, and CFO Brian Offi, already live in the San Jose area and will be in charge of opening AppGate’s new world headquarters offices there, Ridgway says.
AppGate’s products help system administrators determine who could access which applications, from where and when. By using graphical interfaces and Java applets, AppGate says is products are inexpensive to deploy and operate, and they can run on standard servers without modification. By contrast, traditional VPNs are either too restrictive or leave gaps in the security wall and are complex to run, according to the company.
AppGate was spun out of Carlstedt Research & Technology of Gothenburg, Sweden, three years ago and set up shop in Durham 22 months ago. Ridgway says the company already is on the fourth generation of its product and has more than two dozen customers. Most are in Europe, although it recently signed up Spectrum Health, a hospital system and managed care organization in Michigan.
The company, which doesn’t disclose financial information, expects to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year, Ridgway told Local Tech Wire in February.
AppGate: www.appgate.com
