Thought Leaders on Internet of Things: Ordr CEO Greg Murphy (Part 4)

Greg Murphy: What’s interesting is what organizations want. When they think about a managed service provider, they love to have one provider across their entire organization so that they won’t have a provider for one class of IoT devices and another provider for managed devices. In the next four or five years, we’re going to see more end-to-end offerings coming to market.

Sramana Mitra: That’s what I was thinking when you said that some of the IoT vendors are starting to provide managed security services. It would be better if they plug into a managed service provider’s portfolio.

Greg Murphy: You need to understand everything that is connected to the environment. You can’t put on blinders and say, “I’m going to look only at one class of devices.” These devices are starting to cross boundaries. You have medical devices or manufacturing devices that are talking to core enterprise systems.

Having that whole enterprise view is, ultimately, where organizations want to be. I want a partner that’s going to provide as much breadth as they possibly can and not have to contract with 15 different providers for different classes of devices. The long-term winners will be those who can provide that breadth of service across connected devices across the enterprise.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Greg Murphy: We’re located in the San Francisco Bay Area with headquarters in Santa Clara. We have employees around the world. We also have a development and support office in India.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a venture-funded company?

Greg Murphy: We are. Earlier this year, we completed our Series C. We’re fortunate to have backers like Battery Ventures and Ten Eleven Ventures. We’re also very fortunate to have customers like Mayo Clinic that have invested. Kaiser Permanente is also an investor.

Sramana Mitra: What problem would you go after that nobody is working on?

Greg Murphy: We touched on a couple of them already. One is the MSPs. There is a huge opportunity for organizations to provide a service that cuts across the different types of connected devices. You have devices that are connected to an enterprise network. You have devices that go out directly to the cloud providing and building out a managed service provider with that kind of breadth.

Sramana Mitra: That ties into some of the conversations I’ve had on the vertical cloud. The managed service providers are also dealing with vertical-specific issues. That vertical cloud trend applies to the vertical managed service provider opportunity as well.

Greg Murphy: Absolutely. There’s a real opportunity in a number of these verticals to provide very focused services for the specific needs of that industry. You don’t want blinders and say, “We’re only going to do a particular class of devices.” A powerful place to be is to be able to say, “We understand all the broad range of devices you have and we can help you address security.”

If I were an entrepreneur, having some specialization and depth of understanding that some of the other players don’t have would be a great way to get a foot in the door. Every organization that I see today is struggling with the same cyber security gap. They can’t find enough people to address all the needs. The managed service providers can help, but any opportunities to accelerate the education of skilled cyber security is a really fruitful area for entrepreneurs right now. There is no end in sight to the appetite to add cyber security expertise.

Sramana Mitra: If you become a managed security provider that specializes in hospital security, that’s a valuable depth of knowledge that is not easy to find.

Greg Murphy: If you look at a number of industries, there’s manufacturing and education. Layering on that vertical expertise and understanding and offering a managed service is a powerful place to be. There are a lot of opportunities for great companies to emerge in that space.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders on Internet of Things: Ordr CEO Greg Murphy
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