Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Is that the reason why you’re in the US? If you’re selling in Brazil and Asia, being in the US doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Alexandre Cagnoni: There are a few reasons we came to the US. First of all, Brazil is quite complicated in terms of taxes and how they handle international businesses. We believe that the US is a better place to concentrate international sales. Another reason is we are planning, in the near future, to get an investment to accelerate the growth. As I told you, we’re a bootstrapped company. The biggest deals are still in Brazil. Those deals are providing the investment we need for Asia and the US.

US is our next big market. We took some time to look at the market. We know it’s not easy to penetrate the US market. You have to have a good plan. You have to show that you’re a reliable company, your products are stable, and are used by big customers. We’re taking a little bit more time to penetrate the market in the US but this is the plan for 2017. It’s the biggest plan for us right now.

Sramana Mitra: How do you view the competitive landscape as far as US competitors are concerned. You talked about Gemalto and the other company. If you’re looking at the US market, there are other competitors that you need to take into account.

Alexandre Cagnoni: Yes, US is a different market. The Americans are not used to having a physical token. If you go to Europe or Asia, they’ve been using physical tokens for a long time even before the smartphone era. They’re used to carrying one to five tokens in their purse with them. Here in the US, they don’t like the hassle of carrying physical tokens. We’re talking more about mobile tokens.

Another big trend in the US is cloud-based authentication, which is another area that we are studying. When we start working closely in the US market, we’re going to start seeing competition from cloud-based authentication companies and from traditional American companies like RSA, which is now part of Dell. The biggest trend would be in the mobile sector and cloud-based authentication. It’s a big thing in the US and not as big in Latin America and in some Asian countries as well.

Sramana Mitra: Are you going to market in the US with the physical token architecture or are you going to change your strategy? As you rightly pointed out, the US market is not used to carrying physical tokens.

Alexandre Cagnoni: This is exactly the point. We’re going to the market focusing on our mobile token solution. We don’t see a big need for the physical token except for governments or some other strict access sectors, maybe in the corporate security area. Our strategy will be 90% focused on the mobile token and the cloud offerings that we’re going to launch in the second half of this year.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Datablink CEO Alexandre Cagnoni
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