Family Zone sweeps up telco service provider as demand for cybersecurity grows

Cyber safety is becoming an increasingly important topic as privacy and security dominate the attention internet surfers.

In an attempt to capitalise on this trend, cybersecurity company Family Zone Cyber Safety (ASX: FZO) is continuing its march towards establishing itself as the go-to solution for both the average internet user and large companies providing blanket security across various devices to millions of users.

Family Zone has signed a collaboration agreement with Netsweeper, a prominent provider of filtering services for enterprises that currently categorises billions of web addresses and has over 500 million registered devices using its range of platforms.

The deal comes around 2 months since Family Zone struck an agreement with TCL Corp that will see its software installed in Alcatel’s upcoming range of smartphones in Australia and New Zealand.

Further afield, telco service providers and handset manufacturers have begun to embrace Family Zone’s ecosystem approach, with Family Zone having recently signed reseller arrangements with industry leaders including Telkomsel in Indonesia, Smart Communications in the Philippines and Maxis in Malaysia.

The company has also signed a potentially blockbuster deal with Aircel in India,  a major Asian telecommunications provider with over 90 million subscribers.

The latest deal with Netsweeper further highlights that Family Zone is not content with simply offering its services directly to customers but is actively pursuing large corporate clients that will integrate its software in millions of devices worldwide.

Sweeping the net

Netsweeper typically offers its services to governments, telcos and schools to enable them to manage internet activity within their networks.

Family Zone said that it is entirely focussed on solving the cyber challenges of parents and parent communities with its services being sold directly, through telcos or enabled through schools. Regardless of the point of sale, the company says it intends to support the needs of parents, but by the same token, wants to generate subscription revenue.

Through the collaboration, the parties have agreed on wholesale terms across all of Family Zone’s offerings which are designed to suit Family Zone’s ‘global platform’ approach to cyber safety and to support the rapid expansion of Family Zone’s consumer services, particularly in the US.

As part of these arrangements, Family Zone has agreed to issue Netsweeper just over 2 million new shares as a prepayment for $1 million of future Netsweeper services. Family Zone says that this arrangement is “directed at ensuring alignment of strategic interests” for both parties. The issued shares are subject to a voluntary escrow, being progressively released as Family Zone’s use of Netsweeper services consumes the prepayment amount of $1 million.

New features

One of the key reasons for Family Zone and Netsweeper taking the decision to collaborate is to overcome “historically low adoption rates of telco filtering services,” given the lack of suitable technology that could allow users to have their traffic filtered without compromising connection speeds and convenience.

According to Family Zone, its technology can overcome these challenges because it can resolve this weakness by operating outside of the restrictions imposed by the network and therefore create new commercial opportunities.

Family Zone said that under their agreement, Netsweeper will interface its in-line telco deployments into the Family Zone ecosystem offering parents the ability to apply the same setting at home (on a Family Zone router), on a device (via a Family Zone App), at school (via Family Zone’s Education solutions) and in the mobile network (via Netsweeper).

Family Zone insists that the deal agreed with Netsweeper is a “world-first” collaboration, “enabling embedded telco filtering services to integrate with a parental control offering that works at home and at school”.

The collaboration enables Netsweeper’s telco clients to provide a cutting-edge cyber safety offering that is currently unparalleled in the industry, and therefore, provides more effective security that could lead to better bottom line outcomes.

“Our relationship with Netsweeper has been important from the time we started. We are very excited to be able to now take this relationship to the next level. Through our new collaboration we and Netsweeper will get to support the holistic solutions parents are demanding,” said Mr Tim Levy, managing director of Family Zone Cyber Safety.