
Quest Software boosts Australian channel strategy with new leaders
Maureen Perrelli has been appointed as Chief Channel Officer to lead Quest Software's global channel strategy. Perrelli's previous roles include Vice President of Worldwide Channel Sales at NCR and Chief Revenue Officer at Brivo, alongside her experience at Oracle, GE and Secureworks.
Within the Asia Pacific and Japan region, Angela Maniscalco steps into the Head of Channel post after five years leading erwin sales across APJ and ANZ, including during and after its integration into Quest. Maniscalco's earlier experience includes serving as Head of Strategic Partnerships and Marketing APAC at Insight.
Channel focus
These appointments are positioned as part of a targeted effort to grow Quest's local presence by delivering enhanced partner programs, increased enablement, and new opportunities for enterprise collaboration. Quest sees the Australian partner ecosystem as a central component in driving growth, particularly in sectors faced with high regulatory requirements. "Australian partners are at the heart of Quest's growth strategy as we expand our cybersecurity, data, and modernisation portfolios. Our goal is to build deeper and more strategic partnerships that deliver strong customer outcomes, especially in complex, highly regulated sectors such as finance, government and healthcare," said Maureen Perrelli, Chief Channel Officer at Quest Software.
The company has outlined plans to expand and improve its partner program. Central to this refreshed approach are enhanced enablement resources, new certification pathways, and a suite of benefits across Quest's solution areas.
Three solution pillars
Quest Software is grouping its offerings into three primary areas. The first is Cybersecurity & IT Resilience, which includes tools for Active Directory protection, threat detection and recovery. Among the upcoming products, the GenAI-enhanced Security Guardian is scheduled to launch later in 2025, promising to enhance detection and response capabilities for environments using Active Directory and Microsoft Entra ID.
The second area, AI-ready Data & Governance, equips organisations with support for discovering, governing, and preparing enterprise data for compliance, analytics and future AI initiatives. This emphasis responds to increasing regulatory scrutiny and the drive toward making enterprise data audit-ready for statutory compliance and analytics.
The third core pillar, Migrations & Modernisation, encompasses migration solutions for Microsoft platforms such as Active Directory, Exchange, and SQL Server. Quest points to its On Demand Migration platform, the first migration product to achieve Microsoft 365 Certification, providing assurances to partners involved in cloud transformation projects.
Quest expects these solution pillars to be strengthened by the new leadership structure and targeted partner program enhancements.
Deeper partner engagement
The company is also investing in joint go-to-market initiatives and field engagement, aiming to equip its Australian partners to address customer challenges more effectively and grow their own businesses. "Our strategy is simple: put customer outcomes first by working closely with trusted partners. It's not just about building great products, it's about how we take them to market together and create real value for customers," Perrelli added.
Quest Software states its ongoing commitment is to deliver technology and solutions that support enterprise needs around data management, cybersecurity and platform modernisation. The company's larger client base includes over 45,000 organisations worldwide, among them more than 90% of the Fortune 500.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Otago Daily Times
3 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Rich Aussies on the hunt for $3m-plus properties
A high-end Arrowtown-based realtor recently named New Zealand's best real estate agent says there's a big shortage of luxury Whakatipu properties for sale compared to the number of interested buyers. "The current market is seeing a 10-fold imbalance of buyers versus available high-end properties, with Lake Hayes noted as a hot spot for demand," Oliver Road managing director Cam Winter says. "We are contacted daily by buyers with budgets of between $5million and $25m, but they have very specific requirements and aren't going to part with that sort of money if something isn't quite right." People with $8m to spend won't just buy the best available option, he notes — "they're happy to wait until the perfect place comes along". Winter, who's been joined by sales partner Omea Swanson over the past six months, won the best NZ agent award (2025-26) at the International Property Awards' Asia Pacific awards in Bangkok, Thailand — he also spoke on a panel about the Queenstown property market. Oliver Road also won best real estate agency website in NZ and the top NZ marketing award. With the first two awards, Winter and his firm are also in the running for Asia Pacific and international awards which will be announced in December. When his company solely operated in the Bay of Plenty, he also won the Asia Pacific best agent title in 2021-22. He set up his Arrowtown office in '23 and, since launching with three listings 18 months ago, the firm's sold 18 properties ranging from about $3m to $12m. Winter notes buyers like his agency's transparent pricing. "As the agent for a property worth $7m or $8m, we have a responsibility not only to the seller of that property to get the best price but also to the current and future sellers of other properties in what is such a small market segment. "The results heavily impact what can be obtained for other properties." He notes about 60% of his buyers are from Australia, and primarily Sydney. "A notable recent sale of 408 Littles Rd at $7.23m took place after a multiple offer situation with both buyers being from Australia." Following recent comments from NZ First leader Winston Peters, whose party's in the coalition government, "we expect the current overseas buyer settings [allowing only Australian and Singaporean foreign residential buyers] to change, though this is likely to allow only those investing in the country to acquire property here, over a threshold such as $5m".


Otago Daily Times
19 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Working from home a legal right in Australian-first reform
Working from home for two days a week would become a legal right under a proposed reform in Victoria. Photo: Getty Employees in Victoria will be legally allowed to demand to work from home two days a week if an Australian-first proposed law is passed. The Victorian government has promised to introduce legislation to make working from home a right in 2026, in contrast to other states that want public servants to spend more time in the office. The proposed law would apply to all public and private sector employees in Victoria who can reasonably do their job from home. Yet to be determined are the legislation's definition of remote work, who can do it and the types of businesses the law would apply to, but the government promised to consult before its introduction to parliament in 2026. It sets up a major contest with business groups in an election year, with Labor seeking a fourth consecutive term that polls indicate it's on track to win. The November 2026 election will be the first as premier for Jacinta Allan, who lags opposition leader Brad Battin as preferred state leader. Ms Allan said legislating the right to work from home was good for families and the economy. "Not everyone can work from home, but everyone can benefit," she said. "If you can do your job from home, we'll make it your right." The coalition's push to end to working-from-home for public servants was partly blamed for its unsuccessful result at the May federal election, despite abandoning the policy before polling day. New South Waled Premier Chris Minns has described remote-work provisions as a thing of the past but stopped short of seeking an end to working from home, instead ordering public servants to work principally in offices. More than one-third of Australian employees usually work from home but that number swells to 60 percent of managers and people in professional services, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The bureau says 43 percent who work from home do overtime, compared to one quarter of those who do not.


Techday NZ
a day ago
- Techday NZ
Sensitive data exposure rises with employee use of GenAI tools
Harmonic Security has released its quarterly analysis finding that a significant proportion of data shared with Generative AI (GenAI) tools and AI-enabled SaaS applications by employees contains sensitive information. The analysis was conducted on a dataset comprising 1 million prompts and 20,000 files submitted to 300 GenAI tools and AI-enabled SaaS applications between April and June. According to the findings, 22% of files (total 4,400) and 4.37% of prompts (total 43,700) included sensitive data. The categories of sensitive data encompassed source code, access credentials, proprietary algorithms, merger and acquisition (M&A) documents, customer or employee records, and internal financial information. Use of new GenAI tools The data highlights that in the second quarter alone, organisations on average saw employees begin using 23 previously unreported GenAI tools. This expanding variety of tools increases the administrative load on security teams, who are required to vet each tool to ensure it meets security standards. A notable proportion of AI tool use occurs through personal accounts, which may be unsanctioned or lack sufficient safeguards. Almost half (47.42%) of sensitive uploads to Perplexity were made via standard, non-enterprise accounts. The numbers were lower for other platforms, with 26.3% of sensitive data entering ChatGPT through personal accounts, and just 15% for Google Gemini. Data exposure by platform Analysis of sensitive prompts identified ChatGPT as the most common origin point in Q2, accounting for 72.6%, followed by Microsoft Copilot with 13.7%, Google Gemini at 5.0%, Claude at 2.5%, Poe at 2.1%, and Perplexity at 1.8%. Code leakage represented the most prevalent form of sensitive data exposure, particularly within ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, and Baidu Chat. File uploads and risks The report found that, on average, organisations uploaded 1.32GB of files in the second quarter, with PDFs making up approximately half of all uploads. Of these files, 21.86% contained sensitive data. The concentration of sensitive information was higher in files compared to prompts. For example, files accounted for 79.7% of all stored credit card exposure incidents, 75.3% of customer profile leaks, and 68.8% of employee personally identifiable information (PII) incidents. Files accounted for 52.6% of exposure volume related to financial projections. Less visible sources of risk GenAI risk does not only arise from well-known chatbots. Increasingly, regular SaaS tools that integrate large language models (LLMs) - often without clear labelling as GenAI - are becoming sources of risk as they access and process sensitive information. Canva was reportedly used for documents containing legal strategy, M&A planning, and client data. Replit and were involved with proprietary code and access keys, while Grammarly and Quillbot edited contracts, client emails, and internal legal content. International exposure Use of Chinese GenAI applications was cited as a concern. The study found that 7.95% of employees in the average enterprise engaged with a Chinese GenAI tool, leading to 535 distinct sensitive exposure incidents. Within these, 32.8% were related to source code, access credentials, or proprietary algorithms, 18.2% involved M&A documents and investment models, 17.8% exposed customer or employee PII, and 14.4% contained internal financial data. Preventative measures "The good news for Harmonic Security customers is that this sensitive customer data, personally identifiable information (PII), and proprietary file contents never actually left any customer tenant, it was prevented from doing so. But had organizations not had browser based protection in place, sensitive information could have ended up training a model, or worse, in the hands of a foreign state. AI is now embedded in the very tools employees rely on every day and in many cases, employees have little knowledge they are exposing business data." Harmonic Security Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder Alastair Paterson made this statement, referencing the protections offered to their customers and the wider risks posed by the pervasive nature of embedded AI within workplace tools. Harmonic Security advises enterprises to seek visibility into all tool usage – including tools available on free tiers and those with embedded AI – to monitor the types of data being entered into GenAI systems and to enforce context-aware controls at the data level. The recent analysis utilised the Harmonic Security Browser Extension, which records usage across SaaS and GenAI platforms and sanitises the information for aggregate study. Only anonymised and aggregated data from customer environments was used in the analysis.