British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 4)

SM: Let’s discuss your strategy for growing beyond the UK.

RT: We went out to raise financing, targeted US venture capitalists, and made a deal with Benchmark. We raised $10 million. I used that to relocate to the US to start operations here. The focus was to pinpoint specific targets such as telecoms and email SaaS players and go to market that way.

SM: Why email SaaS players?

RT: We were looking for the profile of a customer who is ideal for us. One of the great things about having a web security business is that every company in the world is a potential customer. The bad thing is you do not know where to focus. The best way to focus is by finding a company that has outsourced security already, because it means they are in the mindset where they do not want to be managing boxes. We wanted to target those customers and we felt that email SaaS players were in that market. That is why we established a relationship with Postini and some other nice email SaaS vendors around the world.

In terms of the telecoms, it makes logical sense. If you have a service provider who is giving you connectivity to the Internet, then they are cleaning it.

SM: How much of your revenues do you have to give to your distribution channels?

RT: It varies, but it is anywhere from 15% to 30%. It depends on the level of volume they bring.

SM: How many users are you supporting across the world right now?

RT: For traffic volume we are near 3 billion web requests on a weekly basis processed through the platform. We have customers through 65 countries at the latest count. We do not publish the individual user number behind those numbers.

SM: Where is your datacenter?

RT: One of the reasons we needed the investment was to be able to build a global network. We wanted to service any company, of any size, anywhere in the world. We have 10 datacenters on four continents that handle the traffic.

SM: Outside of the US and the UK, are you maintaining your strategy of telecom partnerships?

RT: Yes. We do not have corporate offices other than sales representatives. All of our partnerships are global. Our big providers have a global presence, like AT&T and Google.

SM: Google sales your service?

RT: Yes, in two ways. They acquired Postini and we were grandfathered under that relationship. Recently, in the last two months, they decided to integrate us as part of their Google Apps offering. There is a service called Google Web Security that has launched in the last three or four weeks.

SM: What kind of adoption does that product have?

RT: It is very successful because it is a great profile of a customer. Customers who use Google Apps are likely to be customers who do not necessarily want the trouble of managing security. Those types of peripheral customers are good customers for us.

SM: Where are you now in terms of revenues?

RT: The business has grown very well. It is definitely double-digit revenues. Revenues have grown triple digits in the last several years consecutively. In the last three years we have grown 732%.

This segment is part 4 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
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