British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey (Part 7)

SM: Europe is a big marketplace at this point as well, right?

RT: If you look at our historical customer base we are almost catching up, but we probably have a 50/50 split. We also have some Asian customers as well. In terms of an ongoing basis, we are selling more in the US than they are there.

SM: When you look around at the SaaS security space, if you had an unlimited check book what would you buy?

RT: To be honest with you I don’t know that there is a specific vendor that is specifically differentiated within security SaaS. I think there are certain areas of security which are prone to an SaaS offering. It is a shared platform. The more customized the solution required, the bigger the challenge required for the SaaS platform. We enable customers to have their own specific policies and control, but the platform is shared. When we do developments, we know that 90% of our customers want it. When it is more customized, like identity management solutions, I think it is less applicable to an SaaS play. I am a big backer of SaaS beyond security, but I can’t identify specific vendors. I think are doing something completely different.

SM: One way to scale the company is to do a rollup.

RT: There are a couple things there. First is how we evaluate ourselves as a company. Our DNA is security as a service. The major applications are web security. Once you have built this global distribution, customers are asking what else we can take off their hands. We are expanding this platform into additional protocols and security applications. It would be logical to do that, and it can be done organically or through acquisition. The biggest challenge is that it is in our DNA and we automatically think of things like acquisitions and rollups, yet at the same time the core business is growing so quickly and it is so successful that we do not want to take our eye off the ball.

Once you start acquisitions you end up losing focus. You spend management time on integration. I did advisory work in private equity, and I bought companies myself. There is a lot to buying companies and making them work. It is when the core is so powerful and growing so quickly and you have not completed half of the job you can do in the market – you have to balance those two things in the market. I think we have reached the point now where we have the sufficient scale, and it is a machine that is running so we can now start thinking about those things.

SM: SaaS is now a very heavily invested category right now. If you want to scale with rollups you would find lots of people who are in various stages of readiness to be acquired.

RT: I agree. Within security there are a few areas where there is a lot of activity, but there is not a long tail because of the dynamics of the security industry. Once you have built a platform it is very easy for you to take it into some of these areas which are close by. We have to factor those things in as well.

SM: Your engineering team is in the UK?

RT: A lot of operations have transitioned to the US as well. Customer service was based out of the UK and now it is headed out of North America. Now it is UK and US. In the last 12 months we have established an engineering presence in the US as well.

SM: How many people do you have total?

RT: Just over 100.

SM: This has been a good story. Sounds like things are going well.

RT: They are, there is a lot of momentum.

This segment is part 7 in the series : British Brothers: Scansafe Founders Roy and Eldar Tuvey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7