Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub (Part 2)

Todd Greene: From Athenahealth all the way to New York Presbyterian Hospital are built on PubNub. Our technology helps them create ways for doctors and patients to collaborate within a chat application or to share information. On the B2B side, companies like Docusign use PubNub for real-time collaboration during contract signing. Companies like HubSpot use PubNub to power the technologies they sell to their customers to do customer support chat and collaboration.

The other two use cases are device control, especially in the smartphone space, and real-time signaling, such as real-time maps, inventory, prices, and other apps that require real-time data updates.

Under the covers, we provide three core things to those customers. The first is the ability to connect to every device in the world and keep an always-on connection to those devices, whether you’re at home or behind a corporate firewall. The second thing we do is let you deliver information bidirectionally in a quarter of a second or less. It’s important that when I send my chat message, the other person receives it in a quarter of a second.

In PubNub’s case, sometimes it’s a million people receiving messages in a quarter of a second. The third layer of PubNub is the control layer – being able to add business logic in the middle of a data stream. For example, maybe I want to remove certain words in a medical conversation that might trigger HIPAA rules or count the number of messages coming through.

Within the chat collaboration category, these are all companies that power their chat using our connect, deliver, and control infrastructure. We call it a Data Stream Network. It’s a set of global data centers that connect our devices worldwide and allow them to securely deliver information back and forth. That’s the first category.

Sramana Mitra: What about competition? I understand what you do. I also understand that there are other players in that. Could you do an ecosystem map for us at this point?

Todd Greene: Before I get to the competition, let me give you two more use case examples that aren’t chat, just to talk about the breadth of where connect, deliver, and control works. Chatting and collaboration is the first use case for the connect, deliver, and control technology. The second category would be around device control. In the smart home space for example, we connect to devices behind the home firewall to control them.

Smart home products that keep an always-on connection with PubNub, allow us to deliver messages securely, and do things like turn on lights and control door locks. The third category that we use our connect, deliver, and control is in real-time signaling. That’s a catch-all for things like real-time auction prices, inventory for games, location of trucks for transits, or food delivery.

If you think about it, the location of a food delivery on a map as that changes is no different than chat messages or a signal that might turn a light on. You want to have it delivered quickly and you want it done securely and at scale. That connect, deliver, and control technology that we have apply to those three use cases. One is chat and collaboration, two is device control, and three is real-time signaling.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub
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