Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a very specific question. Maybe I should ask you a broader question. Is this still a services company or is this a product company now?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a services company. Products that we sell are developed by a variety of different organizations – Symantec, RSA, and Cisco. They have these tools. What we do is we build processes and people around these products so that organizations can see how data is moving and control how the data moves through the organization.

Sramana Mitra: How big a company are you today?

Chuck Bloomquist: We are a $16 million company with about 100 employees.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a question that you may or may not want to answer. Just to get a feel of the financial metrics of this business, is this business highly profitable? The question that’s really buried in there is what do you do from an operations point of view? There are many methods that services companies have come up with to really enhance profitability. What is your strategy? What can we learn from that?

Chuck Bloomquist: Yes, we are a profitable company. The organization itself developed, what I would consider, proprietary methodologies not only on how to use these highly complex tools, but also the program that has to be wrapped around these products in order to be successful. If you think about the Enterprise Resource Planning software that we deal with in the late ’90s, this product has the ability to reach that deep into an organization. It requires a significant skill set to deploy these systems effectively inside an organization.

Once inside the organization, in order to derive value or intelligence, there has to be this program in place that maintains it, grabs the data, observes the data, surfaces the actionable items, and then presents that information to the decision makers inside the organization. That’s where BEW and InteliSecure has defined its face in the industry.

Sramana Mitra: When you do an engagement like this for an enterprise, what percentage of that project is architecture and the components that you’re going to put in? What percentage of it is writing custom code?

Chuck Bloomquist: We don’t write any custom code. If you’re referring to the creation of the power field, that would be what I would consider script writing more than anything else. You’re developing formulae inside of regular expressions. I would not consider that development.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of building the company, you built this all self-financed? Is there any outside money?

Chuck Bloomquist: In June 2014, we took in an investment bank that injected cash into the business allowing us to grow. Prior to that, there were three investors—myself, my business partner, and an angel.

Sramana Mitra: What do you mean by investment bank?

Chuck Bloomquist: There is an organization called Frontier Capital. They invested in June 2014.

Sramana Mitra: I see. So a private equity fund invested in you?

Chuck Bloomquist: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: I got it. What else is interesting in your story?

Chuck Bloomquist: The evolution of the industry and the timing of how BEW/InteliSecure brought in content analytics is an interesting evolution of technology and process. Probably one of the more interesting components to the story is how you wrap around timing. Also, the idea that content analytics and the proliferation of content analytics at the network level was something that was unheard of five to ten years ago. In another five to ten years, it’s going to exist on every network on the planet. That’s a revolution in technology. What enables that is the demand for understanding how data moves through the environment. That was the driver behind that. That’s a cool footnote to the story.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services From Colorado: InteliSecure CTO Chuck Bloomquist
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