Hitwise CEO Andrew Walsh said the opening of the UK office was the first in a series of global launches the company plans for Europe, Asia and South Africa.
Walsh believes the UK is the ideal -next move" for a local IT company given the parallels between Australian and British business culture.
-At this stage we are looking at opening up in Hong Kong around October and then in Singapore later this year," Walsh said. -We have been careful to look for opportunities to expand without destablising the company."
In order to hit the ground running, Hitwise had pre-sales staff in the UK at least a month prior to the launch, and has already signed up a series of big name customers including the BBC, Virgin Radio, Daimler-Chrysler and Ford. Walsh also said that the company's relationships with UK based ISPs had already netted the company a sample of 30 percent of Internet users in the UK.
Hitwise gathers and interprets data on Internet user habits from a series of ISP partners.
-We even provide our ISP partners with feedback about their own traffic as we have designed a series of 150 categories, or verticals, which we monitor for traffic flow, so we can interpret the data for them," Walsh said.
Walsh also said Hitwise's operations did not invade the privacy of users, as the company does not monitor who the users are, just where they went on the Internet.
-We take privacy very seriously," Walsh said. -We have regular independent privacy audits by PricewaterhouseCoopers and we are careful to protect our customers and partners."
