Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So your investment thesis today, so to speak, is the timing?

Ray Rothrock: Absolutely. It’s the same product we invented 10 years ago. We have 200 customers. We’ve had sales of about $110 million in the past 10 full years. It’s picking up because of the value that we bring.

Sramana Mitra: Going back to my earlier question, what does the competitive landscape look like? If the timing is now right, is the market crawling with competitors?

Ray Rothrock: Yes, there is this company called SkyBoss, which is the same age and investment profile as us. There are a number of other companies that are moving into our space that have been mostly perimeter security companies and firewall management companies. They realized that having end-to-end understanding is very important. They’re encroaching on our domain. Business across all of these companies is picking up steam and speed in terms of growth. There are new investments out there for sure. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Ryan, CTO of Mobile Labs (Part 1)

Mobile devices, especially smartphones, are growing their footprints at an unprecedented scale. Alongside, the mobile app proliferation is gaining tremendous adoption. Mike discusses testing challenges against the backdrop.

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

Mike Ryan: I’m the CTO at Mobile Labs. Mobile Labs is an aspirational name because we wanted to think about all aspects of mobile application development and testing. We started in 2011. I’ve been here for about three and a half years now. Prior to this, I worked for a software emulation company in California for about nine years. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Ray Rothrock, CEO of RedSeal (Part 1)

Ray Rothrock had a successful career in venture capital for 25 years, as a General Partner at Venrock.

He was an active investor in Cyber Security. After retiring from Venture Capital, he now has taken the helm of ReedSeal, a 10-year old security company. This discussion focuses on network analytics within the Cyber Security space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to RedSeal.

Ray Rothrock: I’m the CEO of RedSeal. I was also the original investor of the company in 2004. As a venture capitalist for 25 years, I’ve invested in over 15 cyber security companies. This is one of them. I retired from venture and a couple of years ago the company was flat-lining out. The Board got concerned and asked me to look at it. I’ve been here for the last 18 months. RedSeal is in an emerging space called security analytics. The company’s enterprise software technology addresses large organizations and their networks. We basically understand and model the network to give you full visualization and metrics. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t buy all of Kurzweil’s points, but there are certain things that I think machines can do better than humans. For example, if you look at medicine and diagnosis, if you really have all the data and images set up, I think machines would do a better job with diagnosis.

David Schmaier: I agree with you there. It’s interesting in the area of software that we play in, which is the industry-specific CRM space. They want better human interactions.

Sramana Mitra: I understand. You are enabling people to do their jobs better. If you go in and say that you’re going to replace all your jobs, no one is going to buy your software.

David Schmaier: That’s one part of it. When I call for service, I want the other person on the other end to guide me. This is what we are featuring in Dreamforce, which is the guided interaction capability where based on machine learning, we can guide people the optimal way. You >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In general then, you’re saying that in all your use cases in all the different sectors where you’ve built solutions, it is either Siebel replaced or a custom-built replacement.

David Schmaier: There are other providers we replace like Amdocs and other older, crummy systems. I would say it’s either industry on premise or custom.

Sramana Mitra: What I would like to do is get your input on where the open problems are. Given the context that you’ve set so far, if you were starting a company today, what areas would you point them towards?

David Schmaier: Let’s take your AI comments. We’re actually going to show some brand new software at Dreamforce that we’re launching with Salesforce. Without giving away the news, it’s a line of industry-specific analytics so that on top of all these workflows and business processes, we can now mine that data and tell you things about what’s going on. This industry-specific Big Data is a big opportunity. What we’re >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Essentially in all these large telecom accounts, what you’re replacing is Siebel?

David Schmaier: No, it’s amazing to me that the prior product we built is still the market share leader. We replace Amdocs. We replace custom-built. I would actually say that custom-built is probably our biggest competitor. It’s hard to believe but in the year 2015, people are still trying to build these stuff themselves.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another industry sector.

David Schmaier: Let me take on insurance. In the cloud, you can not only serve the large companies, but also the medium-sized. ABD Insurance who’s a top 100 insurance broker in America is a client. They sell all different lines of insurance across multiple carriers. They’re using Salesforce. They’re liking it but not getting the value that they were hoping for because they just couldn’t do all the things they wanted to do with Salesforce. We came in and deployed Vlocity Insurance. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get back to doing some use cases in the industries that you are working with and really understanding what was happening before you came in to those situations and what’s happening as you do your magic in those use cases.

David Schmaier: Let’s go back to Sky Italia now. I met Sky last year at Dreamforce. They were using the Siebel Communications industry-specific on-premise piece of software that some of my people here have built over a decade ago. They wanted to move to the cloud but Oracle had not invested in the Siebel product after that acquisition. It’s hard to stay competitive if you don’t invest in a piece of software for a decade. Oracle really did Sky a disservice.

When we met them at Dreamforce, they had been starting on their journey to go to Salesforce. They just purchased Salesforce. What a lot of people do today with Salesforce and the Salesforce ecosystem is you buy Salesforce and then you hire a systems integrator and they custom-build >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: David Schmaier, CEO of Vlocity (Part 3)

David Schmaier: The best customer experiences are industry-specific and they’re omni-channel. I might want to go to the website. You might want to call a company via the contact center. My colleague might want to walk into a retail store. What customers are starting to expect is I go on the website on my iPhone and then call them up. Then I walk into a retail store and they actually know who I am. That’s the omni-channel part of it. If I’m doing business with Verizon versus GAP versus the State of California, it’s different. Yes, it’s all CRM. Yes, it’s all omni-channel, but what I actually do when I’m in that store or talking to a call center agent is really different. The processes and the steps you go through is entirely different. >>>