Carnival in the Cloud: Aria Helps Recurring Revenue Companies Bill

According to market reports, companies with businesses focused on recurring revenue models, such as those of cloud technologies,  telecom, digital entertainment, and even retail contribute nearly $300 billion to the global economy. There is a growing demand of cloud-based billing services especially tailored for these companies. Recent market reports suggest that the cloud-based billing market will be a $9.5 billion market by the year 2018.

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Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Georges Lotigier, CEO of Vade Retro (Part 1)

Email security and the future of email is our topic of conversation in this interview. Very intersting discussion on email marketing as well.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with a bit of background about Vade Retro. Tell us about the company. Tell us a bit about yourself.

Georges Lotigier: I am a serial entrepreneur. We were two associates. Together, we have created about 10 different companies. Unfortunately, my associate left two years ago. I’m the President and CEO. I manage three companies now and Vade Retro is one of them. We have founded companies in IT, mainly in security.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you located?

Georges Lotigier: Our headquarters is in Hem, France. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What kind of market uptick are you seeing in adopting a solution like yours?

Greg Enriquez: What we’re seeing in the market today is that deception technology is gathering the attention of sophisticated security teams. Recently at the Black Hat Conference, there were a number of workshops on deception technologies. What’s happening is, in the world of getting an active defense, security teams no longer want to sit back and wait to be attacked. They don’t want to look through thousands of alerts to determine it’s the bad guys.

They want to take a proactive approach and be a little more offensive about their defense. The benefit of something like a decoy is that we give high fidelity alert. If we’re touched, it’s pretty much a conviction. We know someone who shouldn’t be doing something has touched us. Instead of giving you thousands of alerts to sort through which one is bad, we give you very few alerts with high reliability that it’s >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on how you do what you do. Let’s say I’m an enterprise. How am I interfacing with your technology?

Greg Enriquez: If you are an enterprise and you’ve got a security team of two people or 200 people, you’re looking at a layered defense to protect your environment. You have to have a perimeter defense. You have to have end-point defense. At least, some form of anti-virus. Maybe, an IPS system. A good security defense will have multiple layers of tool to protect their environment and they’ll have diligent professionals following up on those alerts. Where we come into play is we build a gap. When the perimeter is breached and the security team is not aware of it, we will find it first because we operate inside the network by putting decoys and traps inside your network that attackers will touch if they breach your perimeter. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Greg Enriquez, CEO of TrapX (Part 1)

CISOs are flooded with Cyber Security Vendors trying to sell them solutions. What are they looking for?

This and other topics are kicked around in this insightful interview.

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

Greg Enriquez: I’m the CEO of TrapX Security. TrapX is a security technology provider and services. We provide deception technology and assist enterprises in providing a duplicate of their real network. We provide a shadow network or deception technology in their environment so they can fool attackers and protect themselves from threats in the cyber environment. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: How has your revenue ramped from the 2007 time frame to 2015? Where are you now?

Chris Grandi: We’re growing over 50% per year. In year one, we started our revenue with less than a million dollars. You grow a 100% when your revenue is smaller. Our revenue is significantly bigger now but we’re still growing at more than 50%.  I actually don’t think that we can grow this company at greater than 50% because of the service levels that we have to provide. I will be very pleased if we continue to grow at 50%.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still doing it as a self-financed business? >>>

Concept Financing from Andreessen Horowitz: Andrew Rubin, CEO of Illumio (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the Valley?

Andrew Rubin: In every sense of the word, people talk about luck, timing, and fate being not everything, but an important part of the story.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a very big thing.

Andrew Rubin: It’s an incredibly important part of the story in my case. While I was at Cymtec, I was coming out to California for conferences and to visit colleagues. On one of those trips before I moved out here, I was introduced to PJ Kirner who is the co-founder and CTO of Illumio. We were introduced by a mutual colleague who thought that we might enjoy talking about security and talking about views of the world that he believed we shared in common. PJ and I got together and had lunch. That started a conversation that, in a lot of ways, lasted a year and a half and led to the formation of Illumio. >>>

Bootstrapping a Virtualization Services Company: Chris Grandi, CEO of Abacus Group (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is it about the hedge fund space in terms of work flows or virtualization? What specifically is different in that space versus other verticals?

Chris Grandi: There are really two things that make the hedge fund space different. One is the level of service. Because of what hedge fund managers do and how active they trade, everything has to work all the time. We all know that in technology, that’s not necessarily feasible, but the service level demand of giving them the best technology and the best service around that technology is higher than in any other industry I’ve ever been a part of. Correspondingly, because they’re hedge funds, their economic model is great. Their willingness to pay is higher. From the standpoint of just service levels, it’s very unique to hedge funds. If trading systems go down for 20 seconds, they could lose millions of dollars. You really have to prioritize building not only enterprise class technology, but also the various other redundancies. >>>