Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: But you would still have to sell the full product – hardware and software – if a carrier wants to work with you.

John Wu: It depends on the carrier. Some carriers have their hardware vendors picked out. They want to use their hardware vendors. We can port the software onto this hardware. Other carriers don’t mind just getting any solution. We could offer them the full solution.

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The primary pain point around which you’re positioning your solution is this parent trying to protect children.

John Wu: Correct. That’s a very salient pain point that a lot of parents are facing today. Less so in terms of people concerned about their refrigerators getting hacked. Once you have our product, we let you know what we’re doing on the network to help you protect against hackers who are trying to hack into these devices as well.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Where do you advertise or how do you find the customers that have this pain point?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Gryphon CEO John Wu (Part 1)

Gryphon is a very interesting company in the B-to-C Cyber Security space. This interview discusses their go-to-market strategy and equity crowdfunding strategy in significant detail.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Gryphon.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much of this industry do you think has a solution?

Amit Jain: I’ll put it this way. Our enterprise customers also grow by acquisition. There are also inherent technical debts as well. It’s a herculean task for these companies to have a uniform technology strategy. Maybe 10 different ERP and homegrown field services.

A lot of these companies have a solution in place. Typically, the smaller ones have paper and pencil solutions and a lot of homegrown IT solutions as well. The point is how and when they’ll evolve into solutions such as ServiceMax. We think that there are enough proof points in the market from an ROI perspective for these companies to go in more aggressively now versus five to seven years ago.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m seeing it everywhere right now. The investors are talking about it. They want to see vertical cloud products. Your insights are very timely. What are the open problems from where you sit? ServiceMax has achieved quite a bit of scale. What is your current ARR?

Amit Jain: We’re over $150 million ARR.

Sramana Mitra: I haven’t followed the recent state of the company. Are you public?

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Have Zendesk and Freshworks put in field services or are they integrating with other field service solutions?

Amit Jain: I don’t know of a solution from Zendesk and Freshworks specifically. The customer profile for them tends to be more mid-market versus our enterprise focus. We don’t have specific integrations into those systems.

Sramana Mitra: Your primary source of a help desk solution is all Salesforce-based?

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 2)

Amit Jain: It made a lot of sense from two angles. One was, it was more cost-efficient and faster because we didn’t have to spin up a bunch of teams to build infrastructure. We focus our teams more on the differentiating capabilities of a field service solution. Also, it helps us that we are on the same technology platform as Salesforce. That’s where the ecosystem is valid.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Amit Jain, Chief Product Officer, ServiceMax (Part 1)

ServiceMax is one of the great success cases of the Bootstrapping by Piggybacking strategy that we espouse in 1Mby1M. It is also an excellent Vertical Cloud case study. Please study this case study to understand the nuances of how the company leveraged the Force.com platform in compelling ways.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to ServiceMax as well as yourself.