Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that next inflection point. What happened? What do you think drove that? What were the strategic moves that you made to get that next level inflection?

Jeff Mullarkey: It really started with us analyzing the value that clients actually got out of working with us. We were working, typically, with leading-edge technologies that customers were trying to bring on. We also had to do fairly large assessments, which were often bigger than the scopes for implementing the technology. We got very good at understanding organizations that were having challenges with executing IT strategy in general. We could see that sometimes it was due to design and sometimes because they were managing it incorrectly. We started talking to clients about IT maturity model. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the trends in that? I would think that the public cloud vendors – people who provide SaaS as their core business – isn’t it their responsibility to make sure that they’re providing their data and applications in a secure way?

Pravin Kothari: That’s a great question. Every cloud provider like Microsoft, Google, or Salesforce has security. For example last year, ZenDesk got compromised and their customers’ data got stolen. DropBox forgot to check passwords just 18 months ago where they pushed the release build out and did not check the password. During that time, we don’t know how many people can access your documents. Even though they provide network security, there can be issues that can allow hackers to access information. That’s the issue with all these cloud providers. They are doing a reasonably good job, but that may not always be perfect. >>>

Bootstrapping to $45 Million from Chicago: RKON CEO Jeff Mullarkey (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: For how long did the legal business run?

Jeff Mullarkey: We still work with legal today. We were predominant in legal from, I would say, mid-1998 to 2000. We expanded from there. When we started to shift our focus to security, we became non-vertical specific. We worked with everybody at that point.

Sramana Mitra: You still work with the legal vertical but the core offering became security. That was which year again?

Jeff Mullarkey: We were doing security all along, but in 2000, we made that shift. As a technology, it was being underserved in every vertical out there.

Sramana Mitra: In 2000, did your revenue cross a million already?

Jeff Mullarkey: Yes. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me actually double-click down. Our audience is very sophisticated. We’ve covered Palo Alto Networks for a long time and very intensely. We’ve covered FireEye for a long time. Let’s try to put it all in some sort of an ecosystem map. In your worldview, where does FireEye sit? Where does Palo Alto sit vis-a-vis CipherCloud?

Pravin Kothari: Definitely. I was just coming down to that. There is a need for security in endpoint like mobile devices, desktops, and servers. There is a need for security in the network. There is a need for security in the enterprise like Symantec. There is also a need for security in the cloud. The whole IT infrastructure is shifting towards cloud. Right now, I would say the tipping point is going to happen in a couple of years where more applications are going to be deployed in cloud than on premise. There is an increasing need for building security for the cloud. This is an area that CipherCloud focuses on – cloud security. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: CipherCloud CEO Pravin Kothari (Part 1)

Massive cloud adoption has added tremendous velocity to the speed at which business is done these days. However, it has also opened up security gaps. Listen to serial entrepreneur Pravin Kothari’s perspective on the subject.

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

Pravin Kothari: I’m the founder and CEO of CipherCloud. CipherCloud is a cloud security company. It’s focused on helping enterprise customers adopt cloud in a secure way. We allow our customers to get more visibility and more control over their cloud adoption.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s take it from an ecosystem point of view. Could you map the ecosystem for us with a slightly high level perspective so that we can figure out where you’re positioning yourselves in that general landscape? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at now? How big a company are you now?

Rich Kahn: There’s about 40 of us in the company. We’ve been in the same building now for probably seven years. Our first building was small. We outgrew it quickly and built a much bigger building.

Sramana Mitra: Are you a $10 million dollar company, $50 million dollar company, or $100 million dollar company?

Rich Kahn: Depending on the year, we’re between $8 million and $10 million. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Does that mean that you’re able to intercept the traffic before that traffic catches your client’s websites?

Rich Kahn: Yes, exactly. We place out an ad on the publisher’s site. The click takes place. That click has to go through our system for billing purposes. Before we go to the billing process, we go through our entire analysis to see if that click is good or bad, and we’re able to do the entire analysis in under 20 milliseconds. We got it fine-tuned, and it took years to get it down to that speed. We wanted it to be nice and quick. Once it identifies it’s good, then we’ll send it to the billing system. We’re intercepting the click before they even see it. This way, they don’t get affected either by paying for the click or if it’s a type of traffic that’s going to inject code into their site, we’re preventing that as well.

Sramana Mitra: You are capable of handling both types of fraudulent traffic that the client should not be built for as well as the ones that can potentially infect the client. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Rich Kahn, CEO of eZanga (Part 3)

Rich Kahn: In addition, we’ve got somewhere around 3,000 plus unique sources of traffic coming in on our network. We’re monitoring every one of those sources and every single click coming into the network. There’s about two billion queries coming into the network. We use predictive analytics to identify a source’s likelihood to convert. This is pretty unique. What it does is when traffic comes in, we eliminate anything that’s fake, so we know that the traffic that gets to our clients is real. That’s step one.

Step two is what is that traffic good for. Is it just window shoppers who are just browsing the Internet to look at different things? That’s great for branding type of campaigns. Then we have people who are spending money and buying things. That’s more of our premium network where people are focused on spending money and interacting. >>>