HighQ, a provider of secure enterprise cloud collaboration, just announced that, driven by record growth, it is expanding its activities in the US market. The company already has many enterprise clients in the United States, including Duane Morris LLP, Littler Mendelson PC, Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP and Taft Stettinius & Hollister LLP and says it is positioned to be the American legal industry’s cloud collaboration platform of choice*.
“Companies are looking for simplicity in today’s increasingly complex global business and regulatory environment,” said HighQ CEO Ajay Patel. “HighQ addresses the need for intuitive, secure cloud collaboration while providing the safeguards that industries like legal, finance and government need in order to assure data privacy and compliance. As traditionally risk-averse industries find themselves needing to embrace the cloud, HighQ is becoming the solution of choice.”
HighQ is poised to enter an American market in which the only other viable choices threaten companies with high implementation costs, compliance risks and privacy issues related to data sovereignty. Unlike many other cloud productivity and collaboration solutions, such as Box (file sharing), Jive (social collaboration), Asana (task management) and Smartsheet (online spreadsheets), HighQ combines multiple feature sets into one single-tenant solution. Enterprise CIOs get the security and privacy they need for their organisation’s most sensitive work—as well as assured data sovereignty—and end users enjoy an intuitive, consumer-grade experience for file sharing, social collaboration, project management and cloud storage features.
“HighQ’s philosophy is to create innovations that meet its clients’ industry needs,” said Linklaters Head of Online Marketing, Stéphanie Bonnet. “They’re very in tune with issues and developments in the legal services industry.”
The Data-Sovereign, Private and Secure Cloud With increasing international tension around where data is stored, from the Snowden revelations, ever-changing US-EU Safe Harbor agreements, Germany’s Federal Data Protection Act and the commonly cited PATRIOT Act, global enterprises find themselves stuck between two poles. On the one hand, cloud collaboration and file sharing is essential for doing business in the modern, mobile era. However, because most cloud data centers are located in the United States, companies risk making their sensitive data and transactions vulnerable to surveillance or seizure, as well as alienating clients who are not willing to potentially expose their data to US authorities.
HighQ bridges this divide by providing a unified cloud solution that can be hosted in data centers in the UK, US, Channel Islands, Dubai and, later this year, Australia and Canada. Because HighQ’s international operations are maintained as separate entities and they offer clients a choice of where to store their data, non-US clients can be assured that their data is protected and does not fall foul of the US legal system, as recently experienced by Microsoft (even though their data was hosted in Dublin).
HighQ recently opened Chicago and San Francisco offices to expand their existing presence in New York and Philadelphia. The company also has offices in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Sydney and Ahmedabad (India). Headcount increased 30% last year, with notable new hires including Prateek Kathpal (Chief Strategy Officer), former CEO & founder of Adeptol (sold to Accusoft Pegasus in 2011) and Sunay Shah (VP of Business Development, US), a former Goldman Sachs banker and CEO & founder of CDO Software.
* Comment: In the UK, HighQ has pretty much slaughtered the one time sector market leader IntraLinks – see column X in the Insider UK Top 200 chart https://legaltechnology.com//top-200