Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? I imagine you probably have a tiered pricing model but how do you break it down?

Peter Bauer: The beauty of SaaS, as you know, is subscription-based pricing. The beauty of our platform is that it’s very flexible. You can almost pay per use case. You can subscribe to a use case. We have very broad solutions, so if you’re interested in large file sending, you can subscribe to that. If you’re just an email security firm, you can subscribe to that. It’s per user per year depending on which services you add and leverage.

Sramana Mitra: You do allow a lot of unbundling. Even though you have all three categories of services, you don’t necessarily ask people to buy all three. You offer them on a piecemeal basis.

Peter Bauer: Absolutely. That’s important particularly for big companies that want to solve a particular problem at a time. What we found was small to medium sized companies really love our suite approach. They’ll buy a package that includes a lot of things because that represents very good combinations of value.

Sramana Mitra: Given that that’s the vantage point from which you’re looking at the industry, tell me what trends are you observing, anticipating, and predicting.

Peter Bauer: We deal with so much information. We have over 20 petabytes of data that we’re the custodians of. We think a lot about when people would interact with their information. We’ve learned of a particular access methodology for vast amounts of unstructured data from search engines. The way in which Google operates has set a paradigm for storing and accessing information. What’s really interesting is search-and-scroll is one approach. It works quite well when you’re dealing with information that is well-organized by people for search engines. Google has some great advantage in terms of organizing information in that they don’t actually have to organize the world of information. The world organizes it for them because everyone is significantly incentivized to do search engine optimization.

When you go find a company, nobody is incentivized to optimize their information for search engine, retrieval, and those kinds of purposes. People just accumulate stuff. The experience of re-consuming and rediscovering information inside a business – even the data that you have in your personal life – it’s all badly organized but we have an expectation that search-and-scroll will help us get there.

There are two things that we look at, given our vantage point. One is predictive artificial intelligence. Trying to look hard at what an end user is trying to do is thinking about trying to make a variety of associations and then present those with what we think would be relevant. I think Microsoft has got some big investments going on in that direction – trying to automate productivity and create spontaneous things.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast
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