Tumbleweed’s Turnaround Strategy

I recently interviewed Taher Elgamal, famous cryptographer, and currently the CTO of Tumbleweed, a $60 Million email security company. I asked him where he sees the opportunity for Tumbleweed to play in the Security space, which is hopelessly crowded.

Taher said: “The industry essentially was split into different sectors. Some became part of the network fabric, and folks like Cisco buy these companies up. Another part is associated with users, and their authentication and management pieces. This is filled with Verisign, RSA and Microsoft. There is also desktop security, which is a nasty beast.

The section which is left is now a fundamental question, and if you ask a CIO or a CTO of any big company what they care about the most, it is actually not the machine or the users, rather it is the data. You can now see the progression of the security industry, and people have tried to solve all of these other problems, but they have not solved the data security problem.

Email is the number one suite of applications that use data in the enterprise. Securing that traffic is a natural thing.”

One of their key competitors was IronPort, which Cisco acquired for their anti-spam appliance, not email security. This leaves Tumbleweed at the head of the pack for email security, which is roughly where Taher is steering the company.

The company’s stock hasn’t moved in a long time, and it is important that Taher’s bet pays off. It turns out, that the Cisco versus Microsoft war will include Security as one of the battles to be fought. Will Tumbleweed manage to carve out its own niche, and not get squashed between the titans?