Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I guess the question that I’m asking you is somewhat broad. By saying that you deploy a secure mobile communication system, are you able to say that your customers are not being snooped on by the government? Are you able to say that the government cannot penetrate these systems?

Gregg Smith: In the security industry, you need to stay ahead of the hacking environment. You have to continually innovate to ensure that you’re providing the best security possible. While the threat level against the mobile ecosystem is very significant today and it’s no longer the kid in a dark bedroom, you’re looking at organized crime. You’re looking at friendly and foreign governments that are trying to listen in to your communications. From our standpoint, we need to continually innovate to stay ahead of that threat environment and that’s what we try to do every day.

In our business, you never say never because nobody has ever fool-proofed. As soon as you say that you are fool-proof, people are going to try and break in to your products. Markets have very sophisticated security systems, but when people decide to break in to your security systems, they are able to do that. They are able to get millions and millions of customer credit card numbers. Those big retailers had the security systems to sniff out if people were hacking into their databases. They found out that the hacker was in there for months stealing information. Again, all of us in the security industry need to continually innovate to stay ahead of that threat environment, but we never say never.

Sramana Mitra: Who are your customers? What market do you go after?

Gregg Smith: We have government customers around the world. We also have media, energy, mining, consumer products, and financial services customers. We span a broad market segment. Any Fortune 500 company could be a customer of Koolspan.

Sramana Mitra: So your target is the Fortune 500 Global 2000 market?

Gregg Smith: Yes, and the governments around the world.

Sramana Mitra: Name the top three to five trends in your industry.

Gregg Smith: Right now, we’re seeing a 67% increase in spending by the threats to compromise the mobile and connected device market. The dollars are shifting from network attacks to the mobile environment because there are many more attack factors in the mobile environment. It’s not our foes that are attacking us, it’s our friends that are attacking us.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean?

Gregg Smith: When the information from Snowden came out, it was discovered that the United States was spying on the cell phones of certain countries they were friendly with. Those countries are spying on us in the same way. What I’m saying is it’s not just China that’s the bad actor here – and they’re very bad – but our friendly countries are spying as well. They might not be spying on our government, although I think they are. They are certainly spying on our industry. That’s happening every day.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Koolspan CEO Gregg Smith
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