Specializing in data security within testing and QA environments, Fremont, Calif.-based Dataguise is amping up its efforts to appeal to compliance-minded business users with a new sales executive appointment that may also heat up its efforts to engage the channel.

The company named Martyn Baker as vice president of sales earlier this month. With more than a decade of sales experience for Oracle under his belt, plus sales consulting experience with startups such as GNR, Baker has a pedigree of both direct and indirect technology selling success. He hopes to tap into his know-how at his new gig to not only spur on direct sales, but to also better enable partners to sell Dataguise into the enterprise.

“I'm a huge believer in using the distribution channel in all its different forms, from strategic to the tactical to actually make the selling cycle that much more productive,” Baker says. “You're a lot more effective when you engage with your partners.”

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While it is the "early days" in his new post, Baker says partners can expect news about program tweaks sometime soon. Though Dataguise relies heavily on direct sales, it still depends on the channel to not only help it penetrate the market, but to also implement the product and service customers with integration work.

As a result, he says the company is particularly looking for system integrators with database and ERP experience.

“Clearly we are focusing on partners that have experience in SAP applications, Oracle applications and what used to be PeopleSoft applications,” Baker says.

His focus in the coming months will be on helping partners emphasize the business-side benefits of data masking within all environments.

“In the past, people have been reasonably happy with the ability of their production data applications to handle security,” he says. “But I don't think there's been much of a grasp of the non-production, QA test [and] offshore development use of real, live sensitive data that's been going on underneath the covers. It’s pretty interesting how absolutely and utterly unaware or trusting the various C-level people have been on what's actually going on underneath the covers.”