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The US-based company has relocated its European sales office from Paris to London and initiated a direct-sales approach in the UK for the first time. GRIC has previously worked only with Internet service providers and value-added resellers in the UK, which typically offer only a portion of GRIC's services to their clients.

GRIC hopes the new selling approach will bring it a significant number of UK customers in the next 12 months. "The UK is a very important market for us," says Hong Chen, the company's CEO.

But the company will continue to seek partnerships in the UK. Chen disclosed that GRIC is in reseller discussions with BT, the UK national telecommunications company.

GRIC's core service is Internet service provision via dial-up connection, wireless systems and broadband networks. But its other services include web conferencing facilities and firewall, intrusion detection and virtual private network provision.

"We offer our services through partners, but many only typically offered our remote access facilities," says Chen. "They would not offer our security or web conferencing facilities. Now we are offering them directly to CIOs who want to provide worldwide Internet access to employees without having to provide modem pools around the world."

The service provides a Windows program that maintains a constantly updated list of access points around the world and their connection details, and the ability for companies to monitor how the employees are using the service and how well their connections are performing.

Chen says the monitoring software is even able to disconnect and prevent access to remote workers if the CIO desires.