Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 1)

We don’t often see significant global cloud technology companies being built out of London. Mimecast is an exception and is likely to go public in the near term. This conversation highlights the activities of a major player in the cloud-based enterprise email system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Mimecast and yourself.

Peter Bauer: I’m the CEO and co-founder of Mimecast. I’m originally from South Africa but moved to the UK in 2002. I set up Mimecast, which is headquartered in London, with my co-founder who is also a South African. The business today has grown to an enterprise SaaS company focused on email and information management. We’ve grown to serve over three million business users including some pretty large companies like Dimension Data and Mohawk Industries.

The company generates over $100 million in annual recurring revenue and it’s been growing pretty fast at 30% a year. We employ about 540 staff. Those are spread out between our London and Boston head office. We also have offices in San Francisco, Dallas, Chicago as well as in Johannesburg and Melbourne.

Sramana Mitra: Can you give us a bit of an overview of the industry sector that you’re in and provide an ecosystem map and how you position yourself in that ecosystem?

Peter Bauer: When you think about email as an end-user, you’re familiar with the idea that there’s a mailbox and a mailbox service behind that. What we focus on are three major enterprise email needs beyond the actual mail server. Those major needs fit into two buckets. One is security. There’s a fairly broad scope in security that covers things like spam and virus protection, encryption, and data leak prevention. That’s all about high availability back-up and recovery. The second bucket is archiving, which is storing and managing information.

Each one of those categories historically had companies that developed point solutions to address issues in each one of those domains. These are companies who would traditionally have built an infrastructure using a variety of these point solutions. What we’ve done differently is we’ve stepped back from that and we said, “Can we build an infrastructure that does all of these things for thousands of companies?” It’s a little bit like your concept of One Million by One Million. We’ve gone and said, “Let’s achieve it. Convergence of a multitude of different pieces of functionality and let’s do it on an infrastructure that is capable of doing it for every company in the world.” That brought huge demands from a technology point of view to build an infrastructure that is capable of doing that cost effectively. It also has all of those rich features and capabilities so that it can address the primary use cases that customers need to address.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast
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