Microsoft for Startup Program Scales Up Opportunities for Woman Led SaaS business; Passport 360
Over the past year, Microsoft Gold ISV Partner Passport 360 has accelerated its Global Go-To-Market expansion for their SaaS solution aimed at assisting organisations to navigate complex safety and compliance requirements whilst simultaneously reducing risk, saving costs, and improving safety outcomes to support ZERO HARM.
Siobahn Whitehead is the CEO and Co-Founder of Passport 360 with over 14 years of experience in the HSE, Contractor Management and on-boarding space within high-risk industries. Siobahn’s experience in contractor management began in 2007 when joining the board of a prominent HSE training provider in South Africa. It was through this experience working with clients and contractors in hazardous environments that lead to the development of the Passport 360 application to manage, streamline and automate HSE processes utilising innovative technologies. In 2019. Siobahn and Passport 360, were amongst 11 Tech scale-ups sponsored by the Queensland Government to represent Advance Queensland at London Tech week, along with Leanne Kemp (QLD Chief Entrepreneur 2020) through the Female Founder initiative.
Being deployed on the Microsoft Azure cloud enables Passport 360 to provide industry-leading scale, rapid customer response time and the ability to execute on country-specific data location preferences. All of this is done while keeping data in Microsoft’s Azure platform secure, and available for value generating cross-application data mining. Leveraging this power of Microsoft Azure and AI, Passport 360’s SaaS solutions support over 3000 organisations in these high-risk environments and continues to attract organisations looking to modernise the way they interact with their workforce of contractors and employees.
The Microsoft for Start-ups team has been instrumental in providing best practises and feedback regarding Passport 360’s marketing and sales processes whilst implementing its global Go-To-Market strategy. With years of experience working with various organisations and helping craft different GTM strategies, the start-up team was well equipped to communicate these skills to Passport 360 to help ensure its success.
“The opportunity to work closely with the Microsoft for Start-ups Team through the program has allowed us to not only expand our reach into the Microsoft Partner Network but to further showcase our Tech and the problems we solve as a business” says Co-Founder and CEO, Siobahn Whitehead
Headquartered in Australia, with offices in South Africa and Brazil, Passport 360’s support from the Microsoft for Start-ups Team demonstrates that diversity and inclusion continues to be a core focus at Microsoft. As a woman-led start-up in tech, Passport 360 has built upon its success by on-boarding companies including Anglo American and Exxaro.
The Microsoft for Start-ups Team have further assisted Passport 360 with valuable introductions with Microsoft’s leading industry experts and strategists and developing alignments with channel partners.
“…. Passport 360 has proved their technical and business maturity of its solution, vetted by Microsoft technical and industry experts. Passport 360’s solution enables our joint customers to benefit from high value functionality and help organizations to remain compliant to Environmental, Health and Safety regulations, achieve zero-harm while achieving significant cost-savings, and reducing risk to improve safety outcomes.”
Raz Bachar
WW Lead – Cross Industry, Microsoft for Startups
The highly configurable solutions are especially designed for Enterprise, Corporate and Medium sized organisations who operate in a broad range of high-risk industries that can include energy, mining, facilities/property, construction, public safety, transport and government. Passport 360 embraces open platform technology to consolidate information across the various internal systems utilised by clients. With Siobahn’s leadership, on-going interactions with its customer base, a clear product roadmap combined with working alongside Microsoft’s Start-up Program means Passport 360 is in a strong position for the future. Passport 360 – available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace – is IP co-sell ready and via its partner network can support organisations globally.”