Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about security as your opening trend. You’re a vendor that’s providing a very comprehensive stack. Are your security capabilities your own or do you work with other vendors that are providing the security capability?

Sash Sunkara: Both. There is a certain level of security that is integrated into our product. We encrypt in a variety of ways in transit as well as at rest. However, we’re not a security software provider. We do integrate with several partners in providing a higher-level of security. As I mentioned, we do financial services as well as government entities. They have higher security >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you picking up from your customer base?

Sash Sunkara: There’s some immediate problems that enterprises are trying to solve. One of the biggest issues is security. I think the clouds have addressed that. They have the newest technologies. These are new data centers with the latest in encryption management. With current data centers, these data centers are aging. The software is aging. They’re finding that, “I’m probably better off going there.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A corollary question, whom do you see in deals?

Sash Sunkara: From a DR perspective, we often see Zerto. We used to see others too. Zerto has quite a strong foothold in the lower end service providers, more in the SMB space. We are starting to see some of them in enterprises. We’ve beaten them in quite a few of the enterprise deals. We do address enterprise complexity very well. In the cloud management space, we see competitors like Red Hat. In a pure migration deal, we sometimes we see Arasimi but not as much as we used to. There are internal tools as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 1)

A deep-dive into cloud infrastructure.

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

Sash Sunkara: I’m the CEO and Founder of Rackware. My Co-Founder is Todd Matters. He’s my Chief Architect. We started Rackware in 2009. Rackware is a cloud management platform specifically targeted at mid-size to larger enterprises. We have a cloud management suite of products. We started off migrating applications into a variety of private and public clouds. Soon after, we introduced disaster recovery in the cloud. >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: When you looked at your business through that lens, what were some of the salient points?

J. Paul Haynes: Our retention rate was 99%. When I shared that with our next investor, they had never seen anything that high. Our customer acquisition cost was too low. From our perspective, you got to get out in the market. You’re missing opportunities because you’re not spending enough on marketing.

I didn’t really have an appreciation for how well we were performing compared to our peers. Those retention rates were off the charts. I quickly learned that that was a differential thing when you’re raising financing. When I was reviewing these with a much more >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What was the growth rate from there on? Once you got to building the SaaS business, you zeroed in on the mid-market financial services vertical. You’ve defined your target audience very precisely. You’ve got this whole community of influencers around you. What kind of growth rate were you hitting?

J. Paul Haynes: This is going back a few years. We were probably in the 75% y-o-y range. It was higher in the earlier days. We’re at about 65% right now.

Sramana Mitra: What are some of the other strategic moves that you’ve made in building the business that are >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How long did it take you to launch the SaaS version of this product? When did you start selling that product?

J. Paul Haynes: A year.

Sramana Mitra: We are talking 2011.

J. Paul Haynes: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: So in 2012, you were a SaaS  company? >>>

Building a Mid-Market Security SaaS Company from Canada: J. Paul Haynes, CEO of eSentire (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where did you raise money? You said you worked with some investors that you had prior relationships with and who wanted to get in early. Are these Canadian investors?

J. Paul Haynes: The first investor was Venture Link, which was Toronto-based. They came in fairly early. They have another affiliate firm. The government put a program in place that encourages venture investment. We were able to take advantage of an interest-free loan that was non-dilutive. There’s a window of eligibility that we just happened to take advantage of. The first round was in June of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: You said something which is a bit unusual. I want to explain that to the people who are reading >>>