British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 5)

SM: What does your competitive landscape look like?

RT: The web security market is now established. It is about a $2 billion market that is growing 20-30% year on year. SaaS is a low single-digit category in that market which is basically just us. Every analyst that you speak to, in our strong opinion, says the web security market will go the way the email security market goes. The SaaS percentage of that market today is 50% and will continue to rise.

SM: Who are the players in that $2 billion pie?

RT: The traditional way of doing web security was URL filtering. Now it is being redefined by everyone with the secure web gateway as a solution that not only filters access to inappropriate content and productivity tool, but also protects a network from malware on the web. The market is shifting away from these legacy traditional URL point products to a broader web security office. We have been the driving force, shifting security management away from the office and into the cloud.

There are a couple of things happening that have increased demand for security in the cloud. One is increased mobility. Organizational users are accessing the network from outside of the net. The SaaS approach to that is perfect – that person sitting in an airport can route their traffic through the nearest processing center and not have the VPN back through the home office.

The other big driver is increasingly distributed architectures. We sell to these very big global customers. Web is different from email. If you have someone like Disney with 30 locations globally, they would have 30 separate gateways. Having an in-house solution is complex and costly to manage.

The trends of URL filtering, distributed architectures, increased mobility and awareness of SaaS models are drivers in our business, and they are why everyone believes that 50% of the web security market is going to be taken by SaaS.

SM: Where do you see Google’s strategy going? They have already put a stake in the ground with email filtering. Is something similar going to happen with web security?

RT: There are a lot of people who are looking at the SaaS web security arena. I have no idea what their plans are in this space. I dare say that they, like other big service providers, are going to be interesting in this market.

SM: It is kind of natural for Google, much more so than for Symantec.

RT: We have always sit back with wonder at how slow the incumbent security providers have responded to SaaS.

SM: They are doing a shitty job overall.

RT: I think some are doing a better job than others, but they are letting people come into their patch. They are letting others take a slice of the pie and they have not developed their SaaS offerings as much as we would have thought.

SM: I find that SaaS activities are typically associated with newer companies like Qualys, which I think is a very interesting company.

RT: They are. We are all part of the community. Interestingly, and this is something that is not the first thing people would consider, but security is the fastest-growing area of SaaS. Often people think that would be counter-intuitive because of the data confidentiality and the risk. It is precisely because of those reasons that it is so important, challenging and dynamic.

SM: It is not easy to find qualified people to do those things in-house.

RT: That is exactly right. One of our customers is ICI, and one of the things they told us was that they had so many regional offices and their security expertise was at headquarters. The fact that they now have a point of central command and control is fantastic. They don’t have to rely on a regional team somewhere to manage and deploy it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
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