British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 3)

SM: Did you have a SaaS vulnerability assessment tool developed?

RT: There were three things. First, we were running an ASP, so we knew about running services in the cloud. Second, we understood the web protocol through our joint venture and we were used to processing large volumes of web traffic. Finally, we understood the security market because we had developed an email content filtering solution as part of a strategic alliance we had with a company on the email marketing side. We put those three things together in 2003, and we were looking at different ways we could reposition the business. That is when we came up with the idea that the web and the SaaS model would work perfectly for us.

SM: Where in the content filtering space do you operated?

RT: It is exactly like Postini but for web protocol, for HTTP. When corporate users access  their email through a web browser, we filter all of that content and enforce corporate email policy. We do that all in the cloud. We take all of the manageability and overhead in the cloud and give them a central command and control. The second thing we do is scan all of the web traffic in real time for threats, making sure no viruses, malware or malicious content get into the network.

SM: Do you sell directly to enterprises?

RT: We sell from small to very large enterprises.

SM: After you re-engineered your business, who was your first customer?

RT: Our first customer was Morse, and they remained our largest customer for a while. I actually cold-called them to validate the market demand for this solution. They were a very security conscious company and had rigorous procedures in place. I had a meeting with six of their representatives, and they bought into the concept. They helped validate the business model as well as form product direction. That was in January of 2004. By the end of the year we had 300 customers and there were only eight of us in the company.

SM: How did you get those customers?

RT: One of our major strengths is business development. We had established some big distribution relationships. One of those was with Star Internet, a local UK ISP. We signed them up and did a lot of integration work with them and their B2B ISP business. That established for formative stage for our whole distribution strategy.

Today we sell exclusively through big partners like AT&T, Sprint, and the service provider telecoms. By the end of 2004 we knew our business model had legs.

SM: What is your pricing model?

RT: We charge a monthly service fee based on users. Roughly, it is about $5-8 per user, on aggregate.

SM: Where your first 300 customers all in the UK?

RT: Yes, they were all in the UK.

SM: What kind of revenue did you hit?

RT: I think we had a couple million in bookings. It was quick. We knew we wanted to go global and be one of the competitors of SaaS web security. At the time it went against conventional wisdom. The knock was that it would slow down performance. Email has an advantage because if it takes a couple of seconds for an email to be sent, nobody notices. The big question has been if it would slow down Internet access, but that is where we already had technology for handling and filtering such large amounts of data.

This segment is part 3 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
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