Today WISeKey announced the signing of an agreement with Whatana Investments Limited to establish a WISekey Affiliate in South Africa.

WISeKey has signed an agreement today with Whatana Investments Limited, represented by Mr. Malenga Machel, to establish a WISeKey affiliate in South Africa in 2008. The objective of this agreement is to establish in South Africa a regional Hub connecting with the recently announced EURO African Hub in Malaga, Spain http://www1.wisekey.com/news/071022MalagaHub.aspx

This new affiliate in South Africa will be part of WISeKey’s Global Affiliate Network which consists of an expanding group of international service providers operational at national level. These affiliates use WISeKey’s common technology, products, operating practices and trusted security infrastructures to deliver interoperable trust services over the Internet. New WISeKey affiliates are now established or in process to be established in Angola, Benelux, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Egypt, France, Gabon, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Lebanon, Mexico, Monaco, Morocco, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UAE and USA.
South Africa is a very important market for WISeKey as it is the leader of information and communication technology (ICT) development in Africa. It is the 20th largest consumer of IT products and services in the world. South Africa's IT industry is characterized by technology leadership, particularly in the field of electronic banking services. South African companies are world leaders in pre-payment, revenue management and fraud prevention systems and in the manufacture of set-top boxes, all exported successfully to the rest of the world. Several international companies, recognized as leaders in the IT sector, operate subsidiaries from South Africa, including IBM, Unisys, Microsoft, Intel, Systems Application Protocol (SAP), Dell, Novell and Compaq.
“Whatana is pleased to be working with WISeKey in Southern Africa; a company with proven credibility and expanding fast into different markets in different continents. The Whatana- WISeKey partnership will put all the necessary efforts to ensure that this is a great success” said Malenga Machel.

"We are delighted to expand our network of trusted affiliates to South Africa, with this new addition, WISeKey Affiliate Network is becoming now one of the most distributed affiliated network on the Internet including governments agencies, national leading telecommunications companies and e-commerce service providers," said Carlos Moreira, Chairman and CEO, WISeKey. "By combining their national expertise, powerful brands and strong customer relationships with our Trusted Security technologies and services, we are well positioned to enable a wide range of trusted secure applications on a global basis."

WISeKey is one of the world’s leading providers of electronic identity (e-ID) trust services. E-Ids’ are used for securing transactions, access to physical and virtual environments and for providing non-reputable identification (identity cards). WISeKey has an established record of expertise in implementing complex e-security projects. It uses its Swiss roots to provide assurance as a trusted third party through adhering to Switzerland’s strict privacy and confidentiality laws and high quality standards.

WISeKey offers to its affiliates a broad array of own developed products and services ranging from the Managed to Extended Trust Model PKI, CertifyID BlackBox, CertifyID Guardian XM, WISeSign PDF, CertifyID OCSP Server, CertifyID CRL Manager, CertifyID Time Stamp Server as well as full-fledged PKI implementation and security consulting including partner products and services such as but not limited to biometric smart cards and USB storage, physical and virtual access control.

The position as a leader on National Identification Systems (NIS) has put WISeKey in a very strategic position for this market, which represents approximately US$4.8 billion dollars globally and should reach US$10.7 billion by 2007. In Europe, more than 120 billion Euros have already been invested in the public sector in this area (government, police, Lisbon agenda, etc.).

In order to facilitate this expansion and because “trust” is local, WISeKey has opened WISeKey Affiliate opportunities for several territories. WISeKey is currently recognized as the best trust model in the world, endorsed by the International Telecommunication Union (http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/e-strategies/ecdc/ra/introduction.html) which is able to deploy a security infrastructure based on national Roots interoperating and recognized amongst them via a global ROOT process. The national Roots are essential to deploy eIDs infrastructures as they ensure government’s total control of their national identification process and sovereignty. It also allows the possibility to enable compatibility between different national eIDs in a similar way that a national passport is recognized by other countries in order to allow citizens to travel around the world. Because the WISeKey brand is a very valuable commodity, the affiliate seeks to deploy WISeKey in markets worldwide.