Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What other vertical solution is interesting?

Dave Maquera: One of the things we have done, particularly in healthcare, with our e-mail security product is focus on all of the key workflows and requirements associated with the highly regulated environment that health providers find themselves in. What that caused us to do over the last 12 months was implement some key items, such as DLP (data loss prevention) specific to healthcare. If you think about Social Security numbers, patient ID numbers, etc. That is very basic, but it can get very granular.

SM: So there is a very specific concern in the healthcare industry, where patient data loss is of critical concern, and that requires a specific solution?

DM: It does. It is fairly dramatic, because it is a regulatory requirement. It is the law to have this type of capability and it is an auditable capability. In other words, it can be tested by regulatory authorities to confirm compliance. All of that goes with a very important thing, which is funding. A lot of healthcare organizations have public funding as a critical part of their budgets. Without compliance in these pieces, they lose funding. So it is hypercritical to have these types of capabilities. Not only having them implemented in your products, but have them implemented in a way that makes a lot of sense to the customer. They have to be customized to their particular vertical, but so do the types of reporting that we offer.  They are specific to their needs, and our cloud-based email solution is highly flexible.

This is also very important for things like the mobile component, as we talked about before, which enables doctors and other healthcare providers to use mobile devices in a secure way that is in full compliance with regulations. That is a place where we added lots of capabilities, such as regulatory-approved archiving, DLP and continuity. Before it was only a spam filter; now it is a full e-mail security gateway suite for the healthcare industry that has worked out very well.

SM: Let’s do one more vertical and then switch to broader industry questions.

DM: We can discuss another vertical that I particularly like, which is the telecommunications vertical. What we have seen in terms of a competitive environment is Postini or other high-end appliance-based solutions from large providers like Cisco and others. We have seen the ability to penetrate that marketplace successfully in the ISP and MSP sectors. The reason why is the technology we have in our cloud-based solution is extremely cost-efficient and scalable. Because of the way we architected it, it uses less computing power, less storage, and less bandwidth than competing products, which is very important for service providers. We built it with telecommunications efficiency and with network efficiency as the basic guiding principle as opposed to taking a security solution and adapting it to a cloud environment. We built it as a cloud architecture from the ground up. Our first iteration is this e-mail product – we will have others in the cloud. But what I like about it is that it has fantastic reporting and scalability, to a level that whenever we talk to an ISP it is very great to hear them say, “Wow, you guys have something really special that meets all of our needs with regards to cost, performance, and security.”

Especially on the security side, we have been told we are the best spam filter that is out there. That matters when you are at the scale of an ISP or e-mail provider who has maybe hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of mailboxes and to have a very accurate spam filter with very low false positive rates. That keeps their costs low and customer satisfaction very high. We thought early on that it was important to architect an efficient network capability into our solution and then layer on security features and capabilities that are very powerful on top of that architecture. It is neat to see this being affirmed by very large and key customers. That is another vertical we focus on and will continue to focus on. It has been our highest growth vertical in the business for the last 12 months.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Dave Maquera, CEO of EdgeWave
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