Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Cylynt CEO Ted Miracco (Part 2)

Ted Miracco: We put our minds together and started a company that was going to produce technology to help protect software intellectual property. That was the beginning. That was one eventful roundtable conversation. 

We launched the company, and it took off splendidly. We started getting into a lot of the engineering disciplines, protecting electronic tools at first and then mechanical and civil engineering. We gradually got traction by word-of-mouth. We have now rebranded the company. Our product is still called SmartFlow, but the company is Cylynt.

Our clients are dragging us into new markets and we’re finding new opportunities to use the kind of telemetry data that we’re capable of delivering.

Sramana Mitra: Let me probe a little bit. Are you still doing the anti-piracy stuff?

Ted Miracco: Absolutely. That’s our core business. We didn’t see COVID coming, but it was very apparent in our data. The COVID pandemic has made it very difficult for software companies to get on site and to visit clients. The whole salesforce and application engineering teams are grounded.

Cylynt gives you visibility into what’s going on in the customer base. A growth market for us is usage analytics. Are clients using the tools? We’re looking at legal use as well as illegal use. Typically, we were tracking just the crack copies and counterfeit licenses.

But our client said, “Can we use this to track our legitimate users as well to see if they need more licenses?” Our software is a toolbox. You can make it do a lot of things. Our clients started to do that.

The use cases that we found to be very important to our clients is tracking evaluation. A lot of software companies give out 30-day loans and trials before you buy. A lot of times, those are just blind. You generate a license file and email it to a client. Then you follow up by phone or by email and see if they’re going to use it.

With our information, you can see if they’re using it. Let’s say the client uses it for seven days and then stops using it. That’s a good opportunity, in the following week, to have an application engineer contact the client and say, “I noticed you’re not using the tool. Do you have questions? Send me your project file. Let me work through it with you.”

SaaS companies are all the rage right now. Everybody is focused on SaaS. One of the reasons is that SaaS companies have instantaneous visibility into who’s using it, who’s logging in, and what’s the consumption. You can see if you’re going to churn.

On-premise software is much more blind. Cylynt does, what we call, the SaaS-ification of on-premise software. We make an on-premise tool look like a SaaS tool if it’s instrumented with our technology.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Cylynt CEO Ted Miracco
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