Seattle, Washington-based communication software company, WRQ Inc is preparing to become a publicly traded company. According to the company’s executive vice president of sales and marketing, Kevin Klustner, WRQ is strong enough to float but it wants to raise its profile and break into new areas before it takes the plunge. WRQ was established as Walker, Richer, Quinn 17 years ago, and is still run by two of the remaining five founders: Doug Walker, who is president and chief executive; and Craig McKibben who is executive vice president. WRQ employs 700 staff across the world and achieved revenues of $138m last year. At the end of last year it said that it wanted to build up its international business to account for 60% of its overall affairs (CI No 3,346). Klustner believes that in order for WRQ to grow to the point the company eventually wants, it will have to make acquisitions and to be in a strong purchasing position, it has to be publicly traded. In its bid to expand further, WRQ has also announced several new products that extend its reach from its traditional host access interests. Software management and network access management are key to the company’s new philosophy. The new release of Reflection X 7.0 introduces hands-free administration that will enable IT managers to have greater deployment, configuration and control over their company’s networks. It includes Reflection Deploy, which is claimed to cut application deployment time from days to minutes by automatically installing applications to networked desktops via the web. Reflection X Profiler gives IT managers more control over access rights and lets site administrators remotely configure and control defaults, establishing a common desktop, as well as declaring who can have access to what. WRQ has also decided its time it got on the Year 2000 bandwagon to help sort out compliancy problems on the desktop. Shaun Wolfe, executive director of product strategy and development says the problems surrounding desktop compliancy when the millennium arrives will be more difficult to iron out than those of the mainframe, because so many different applications reside on a network, and even when a machine has been declared ‘safe’, the situation can easily be reversed if non-complaint software is installed. It says its Express 2000 tools will enable IT managers to discover non compliant areas and enable IT managers to control what software is installed on machines via an alert system that will react if unauthorized software is attempted to be installed.
