Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 3)

Jeff Swearingen: From an entrepreneur’s perspective, there’s always opportunity. The technology market is so saturated with companies and yet the market is moving so quickly. A young and agile company with some domain expertise can spot an opportunity and a gap in the market. That’s what SecureLink did. We found a gap in the market. We were ahead of it. We filled it, and we own it. Nobody does third-party remote access better than SecureLink.

If anyone is looking for an opportunity, you should have some domain expertise. My co-founder and I came from a technology and software background. We knew the people, problems, and the processes. One of the things I mentioned to entrepreneurs is to stay in your gold mine. If you know something about life insurance and if you understand that industry, that is gold. The closer you stick to >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the competitive landscape around you? We do a lot of discussions in the cyber security space. Cyber security has always been one of the most active areas of innovation and entrepreneurship. There’s a tremendous number of vendors and tremendous amount of activity in every corner of the cyber security industry.

Could you help us understand the ecosystem around you? Who’s doing what and where exactly do you position yourself in that continuum?

Jeff Swearingen: I agree that there’s an awful lot of software companies doing an awful lot of different things. When it comes to privileged access for third-party remote support, you don’t need SecureLink. You can buy seven or eight >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Jeff Swearingen, CEO of SecureLink (Part 1)

Jeff provides a window into the remote access world through this interview, a world that is vastly more complex today than it used to be.

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

Jeff Swearingen: I’m the Co-Founder and CEO of SecureLink.

Sramana Mitra: What does SecureLink do? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anne Bonaparte, CEO of Appthority (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch to the 30,000 foot level question. What do you see out there as emerging trends? What are some open problems that you see that if you were starting a company today, you would feel good about solving that problem?

Anne Bonaparte: The data explosion is exponential. We see some sophisticated cross-border cyber battles going on. There are some very big challenging issues that are going to take a lot of cooperation and partnership across public and private to solve. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anne Bonaparte, CEO of Appthority (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How does your system access all of the data that apps are capturing? What is doable in terms of scanning what the apps are doing on these devices that are being plugged into the enterprise?

Anne Bonaparte: We can pull the app inventory from EMM systems. In the cloud, we are doing this analysis that is both static as well as running them in a virtual sandbox. We have millions of apps in our database, so we can easily understand, “Could this app grab calendars?” If you’ve got a flashlight app that is pulling content in the calendar, that’s an indication that you might want to take a second look, because there’s no real reason for that except for malicious or very poor programming practices. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Anne Bonaparte, CEO of Appthority (Part 1)

The perimeter of the enterprise is disappearing. What happens to Security?

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

Anne Bonaparte: I’m CEO of Appthority. Appthority is a venture-backed company. It’s a mobile security company and we’re focused on protecting what matters most in the enterprise context, which is enterprise data and employee privacy. As we all know, we can’t live without our phones, both for personal and business use. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The other thing that I’ve seen in my career in various instances is, people get software and they don’t usually use it or they don’t have the staff who can take advantage of the capabilities of the software. You deliver the Ferrari and are driving it like a Toyota. In a lot of those cases, the SaaS-enabled BPO often can deliver a lot more value because the people who are driving the software are driving like it should be driven.

Brian Jacobs: I should say that the shelf-ware phenomenon is going away in the cloud world. You can stop the subscription if you’re not getting value. The SaaS companies are all very attuned to the understanding that if their customers are not getting value, they will leave. Every company we know has this customer success function which is, all around, making sure that the customer is really using the product. Your main point is an excellent one. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brian Jacobs of Emergence Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What stage do you recommend people to make that shift in your orbit? Are we talking about getting to a million and then moving to Silicon Valley? We see all kinds of permutations and combinations of this behavior. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this.

Brian Jacobs: Rather than a revenue number, I think more in terms of product-market fit. If you’ve got a product that is clearly meeting the needs of your customers and you believe that it’s time to put your foot on the gas and grow your sales and marketing capabilities, then that’s a good time to do it. We see some companies which, for instance, are offering their products on a freemium basis. They are getting no revenue from those customers, but you can start to see if the product is meeting the customer’s needs. That’s more important to us than a specific revenue number. >>>