Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu (Part 7)

Sramana: What about your company team? When you started you where you the CEO?

Eric Chiu: When we started out I was CEO and Renata was VP of Product Management. We hired on a CTO soon after who I consider a quasi founder. We then hired a Sales VP from VMWare. Jim Gannon is still our VP of Sales and he is awesome. That has been a pretty big part of HyTrust. Partnerships have been a big part of our relationships. We have a great OEM relationship with Symantec and CA Technologies. We also have a reseller relationship with MacAfee and we are the go-to market partners for VMWare and VCE when it comes to platform security.

The partner model for us is very important. Not only are we driving huge amounts of business, for example this year we will quadruple our sales from last year, but they also accelerate our deals. VCE brought us into a healthcare account that closed in two months last quarter. That is very difficult to do on your own. Our partner model is very strong and VMWare is at the core of our partnerships.

Having Intel, Cisco and VMware as a partner is a huge validation point with our customers. With our latest venture round we have a lot of dry powder in the bank. We are going to build out sales force. We need more account managers, sales engineers, support personnel, and developers.

Sramana: What kind of run rate are you at now?

Eric Chiu: We are in the double digit millions. We will grow five-fold this year. We are four years in the market. It has been fun. I love what we have been able to accomplish and I think there is a huge opportunity for the company going forward. If there is a big wave happening, it is definitely cloud. We are at the center of that movement. If you look at companies like Symantec and MacAfee they have built their entire businesses around securing Windows as a platform. I think that opportunity is there for us on the VMWare platform.

Right now virtualization and cloud represents about 50% to 60% of the datacenter. It is now critical infrastructure and it enables all new security compliance issues and concerns. Your sysadmins who have god-like access are 10 times more powerful. They could potentially delete and entire datacenter if they wanted to. We are seeing a broad market maturing around that extremely quickly. Almost every big customer is now looking at HyTrust because virtual infrastructure is now critical infrastructure. They need to address compliance before they can address things like Tier 1 applications and compliance workloads.

Sramana: Thank you for taking the time to share your story. I really enjoyed the conversation and wish you luck as you move forward with HyTrust.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Launching and Scaling a Security Startup During an Out-of-Favor Time: HyTrust President Eric Chiu
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