Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: But your customer base is the enterprise. Is that correct?

Dave Maquera: Enterprise, schools, state and local government, and also within the enterprise there are specific verticals. Together these constitute the majority of our business. Those verticals are financial services, healthcare, and telecommunications providers.

SM: Help me understand the ecosystem. What is the competitive landscape in terms of people who are trying to solve this problem? Architecturally, it is still enterprise security that you are trying to solve. How do you slice and dice that landscape? Who does what? Who are the players, and how do you positions yourself in the midst of them?

DM: The industry is very fragmented. You have companies that do very specific “bring your own device” solutions. Then you have companies that do pieces of “bring your own device” solutions, such as focusing solely on encryption. You have companies that do complete outsource management of company-owned devices, such as the mobile device management sector. You have companies that are trying to integrate all of those pieces or variations of those pieces into a menu of different services, all under the guise of the enterprise security they provide. They just act as an assembly point or general contractor to pull it together into different solutions and to customize enterprise solutions.

What I am trying to say is that you have companies that are trying to be one-stop-shops, and you have companies that have isolated technologies for one particular problem, such as high encryption on secure military devices deployed in areas of combat. That is the full spectrum. Where we are trying to differentiate is that we start at the customer. What we do is say, “Let’s take a look at a school, for example, and look at what they are trying to do and how we can enable that.” We look at ourselves as expert partners to all of the industry verticals we serve. For instance, we have some of the largest school districts in the U.S. as our customers. When they started coming out with one-to-one iPad programs for their students, we looked at what the most appropriate way to be secure was – not only at school, but at home as well – and how to make security as seamless as possible for that vertical. We acquired specific technologies and built some technologies, put those all together in a solution that is specific for schools, and offered that as a seamless bundled package for web security.

This is a dramatically different approach from what our competitors are doing in the same verticals. That is our approach. It sounds fundamental, which is that it is a very customer-focus-based solutions approach, but it is remarkably unique in the marketplace.

SM: And you do all of that systems integration by yourself?

DM: That is correct. It is already integrated in our product.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave
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