Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Cylynt CEO Ted Miracco (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: If your primary target is on-premise software, could you comment on what percentage of software is on-premise? The world is categorically shifting to cloud-based software. If your target audience is on-premise, how does that align with the current market trend?

Ted Miracco: That’s a great question. We have technology that works for on-premise and SaaS. It’s a fallacy to believe that on-premise software is going away.

It takes me back several years ago when people were talking about the death of the PC and that everything was going to go mobile. It never happened, and it’s never going to happen. Mobile and tablets are good for consuming information, but they are not nearly as good at creating content. People still rely on desktop and laptop computers for creating content.

On-premise software is not going away and anybody that says it is not paying attention. There are many security issues with the cloud and there are many critical industries.

For example, if Apple is designing the next processor to go into the iPhone, it is not going to put that on the cloud because it’s too valuable. That is going to be done in a design center. In a lot of critical industries and most of the engineering disciplines, their intellectual property is too valuable to be developed in the cloud. We see that over and over again.

That is one of our markets. If you think that SaaS software isn’t being pirated, that’s a complete fallacy. For example, about 26% of the Netflix credentials are being shared illegally, and that is just a consumer application.

The same thing applies to even Salesforce or other popular SaaS applications. There is widespread fraud committed every day. Some of your listeners are probably guilty of this. SaaS companies have not sharpened their compliance efforts too much to date, but it will happen soon.

We have the technology and we are getting more interest from the SaaS community. We are studying the pattern of usage of credential theft and posting of credentials on the dark web. Widespread use of shared credentials is an abuse that we see. It’s an existing problem and it’s a problem that we are solving in the SaaS world. 

Sramana Mitra: I want to double-down on a couple of things. First, you mentioned EDA. They are not a large software segment. If that is your primary segment, isn’t that a fairly small segment?

Ted Miracco: EDA is a relatively small segment, but they are not our primary sector. I just speak a lot about EDA, because my background is in EDA. I have a soft spot for the EDA community because it is vital.

Joe Costello, the CEO of Cadence, used to talk about looking at the technology world as a pyramid and turning it upside down. From that point of view, the whole electronics industry is resting on this tiny point which is the EDA industry. It’s what is used to design every bit of high-tech tools.

Everything that is out there started with EDA. The EDA market was one of the first to adopt our technology and put us on the map. That is important to me and that does underpin the semiconductor industry, which underpins the computer industry, which in turn underpins all the mobile and tablets. Everything is developed with EDA tools and there is a tremendous amount of illegal usage of these tools.

We are in different sectors whether it’s making movies, database tools, enterprise software, or any other sector. We are agnostic. We can protect any kind of software that is out there. However, our focus is B2B software. We are not currently in the gaming market.

We are not out there protecting Xbox-type applications because frankly, they’re inexpensive and the the cost-benefit of going after that is not there. We tend to focus on expensive applications, but what we are doing with EDA is just as applicable to huge database applications and other software out there. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Cylynt CEO Ted Miracco
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