Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We do a lot of business development work and customer service work. All of that is going into different mailboxes in my Apple mail, and then Bcc on to our CRM system which is getting stored in context related to the contact to whom that thread is related to. This is my workflow. It’s an immense amount of data. I dread to see what happens to that in a few years. It’s already a very expensive mail client that is full of stuff.

Peter Bauer: There’s a huge amount of opportunity in this space. I think the challenge with a lot of things that we’ve learned is that, use case by use case, it’s difficult to justify a deep integration into an exchange server. It’s difficult to justify copying all of the emails.

Sramana Mitra: Now we have to do all this manually because the connection between an email client and a CRM system, which is where you’re getting the context, is manual. You have to Bcc everything manually. It’s not automatically integrated. In normal workflow, people don’t send messages from the CRM system.

Peter Bauer: The basic integrations are really client integrations, which starts to work when you’re using your mobile phone to send an email. It’s got to be brought together in the back end. A platform that addresses multiple use cases is what’s best positioned to make a contribution here as opposed to another quick fix that hopes to mine exchange for some metadata. There’s a much bigger server-based cloud data integration activity that has to happen. We’re really excited about that as the leading cloud archiving company in the world.

Sramana Mitra: My last question is about your company. Tell me about how this company has been built. What’s the genesis? What’s the story of the company?

Peter Bauer: Both my co-founder and I had companies, which we sold to public companies in the dot com days. That gave us enough money and enough experience to be dangerous.

Sramana Mitra: You did all that in South Africa?

Peter Bauer: Yes. Both of us were very young at that time. I was 23 when I started my first company. I sold it when I was almost 25. I learned a lot from all of those processes. I worked for the company that bought my business. It reached a point where I wanted to work in a global economy beyond South Africa. I moved to London. I met my co-founder there, Neil. Strangely, he had the same life experience. He was a brilliant software architect where I was more of a systems engineer and a business development kind of guy. We put together the idea for Mimecast recognizing the value of information and email as well as the complexity of all of the moving parts around it.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast
1 2 3 4 5 6 7