Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Michael DeCesare, CEO of ForeScout (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the expectation? I’m a Cyber Security person inside a large enterprise looking at your dashboard. What is your dashboard alerting me to do or take action on?

Michael DeCesare: Our dashboard is a real-time view. It’s agent-less, so it gets its data across all devices. It’s heterogeneous. It works across multiple network architectures, and it’s continuous. We are constantly looking at every connection on the network. What we do is, we see every IP address. Without that customer having to put a lot of effort into the product, we are able to classify almost all of those devices by the correct bucket. We’re able to show them Windows machines from Amazon instances. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Michael DeCesare, CEO of ForeScout (Part 1)

We’ve covered Forescout for a while. They’re doing something very interesting in the Cyber Security space, quite an important architecture to track devices plugging into an enterprise network. This is an important company to understand in the sector.

Here are the two past articles: Billion Dollar Unicorns: ForeScout Does Not Want To Go Public Yet and 2017 IPO Prospects: ForeScout Files “Confidentially” that cover their IPO trajectory and maneuvers.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you introduce yourself as well as Forescout to our audience. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to a 30,000-foot level and tell me the emerging trends and what are you seeing out there by way of white spaces and open opportunities.

Fred Wilmot: One of the very large trends is that there’s huge amassing of espionage tools that are beginning to get more mature. We used to talk about script kitties taking advantage of more advanced software. Now we have organized crimes producing software with the same software development lifecycle that I would produce as a security vendor. That’s impactful. They can make their crime more effective. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who are the top managed services providers who are using your technology? Are there some large ones? What is their target audience? I’m trying to understand where in the landscape you are playing.

Fred Wilmot: I think anytime you talk about MSSP’s, you don’t crack the Fortune 500 per se. The mid-market and the SMBs are areas where people don’t have the ability to build up a security organization or an operations environment. In our top-tier, from a customer acquisition perspective, you would see Entity Security and Optive. We have a couple of partners in Australia and the UK doing the same thing. We have a host of smaller ones that really do target SMB. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Fred Wilmot, CTO of PacketSled (Part 1)

Fred discusses the network security risks continuing to escalate with an increasingly connected universe of things.

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

Fred Wilmot: I’m the interim CEO and the CTO of PacketSled. We are a security platform company founded by security practitioners to help dramatically reduce the expertise, time, and complexity for practitioners to detect, identify, and respond to threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about what other industry trends are you seeing and how that is playing into your work. >>>

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? >>>