Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 6)

Peter Bauer: The opportunity of multi-tenant architectures in a cloud world that required an awful lot of software to be rewritten to be able to leverage the massively powerful hardware, which was fast becoming commoditized, and the massive networks were allowing SaaS to emerge as a theme. We put all these ideas together and decided to start building our platform. Eventually, we ran out of money. We were fortunate our wives were particularly patient with us. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We do a lot of business development work and customer service work. All of that is going into different mailboxes in my Apple mail, and then Bcc on to our CRM system which is getting stored in context related to the contact to whom that thread is related to. This is my workflow. It’s an immense amount of data. I dread to see what happens to that in a few years. It’s already a very expensive mail client that is full of stuff.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 4)

Peter Bauer: My concern with that approach is it’s immature right now. It will be for a while. Since it’s unreliable, it’s also difficult to predict. You don’t know how information is going to be suggested to you. You don’t know what the underlying mechanism is. It can really be a distraction in the same way that something like Siri was hailed as someone super clever that can help you with all sorts of stuff. But I think a vast majority of people have left it alone and are waiting for some future iteration where Siri may be profoundly useful. It’s just not clever enough. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge? I imagine you probably have a tiered pricing model but how do you break it down?

Peter Bauer: The beauty of SaaS, as you know, is subscription-based pricing. The beauty of our platform is that it’s very flexible. You can almost pay per use case. You can subscribe to a use case. We have very broad solutions, so if you’re interested in large file sending, you can subscribe to that. If you’re just an email security firm, you can subscribe to that. It’s per user per year depending on which services you add and leverage.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Whom do you consider as your competitor? It sounds like there are competitors in each of those buckets as well as perhaps competitors who offer all of those.

Peter Bauer: That’s absolutely right. Most of the solutions were designed when computing was largely a LAN-based activity and companies were running things themselves. Some of the bigger players are companies like Symantec and Barracuda. There’re products from HP Autonomy as well. While these companies are quite big and they may offer solutions in each of these areas, each of those products are different in two different important ways. One is they are disparate products. They’re not integrated. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 1)

We don’t often see significant global cloud technology companies being built out of London. Mimecast is an exception and is likely to go public in the near term. This conversation highlights the activities of a major player in the cloud-based enterprise email system space.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to Mimecast and yourself.

Peter Bauer: I’m the CEO and co-founder of Mimecast. I’m originally from South Africa but moved to the UK in 2002. I set up Mimecast, which is headquartered in London, with my co-founder who is also a South African. The business today has grown to an >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 3)

Dmitri Williams: We had a model which started explaining these social influence ripple effects, and catch what we call social whales. These are people who may or may not have a lot of behavior on their own but clearly are causing the behavior of others. That’s where the commercial stuff starts to become much more interesting and obvious. If you know who the largest influencers are in a social system, this is extremely useful on a business model side for acquisition, retention, and for monetization. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Dmitri Williams, Professor USC and CEO of Ninja Metrics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Maybe pick three client use cases who have these large amounts of data. Let’s double-click down on understanding specifically what that data contains and what kinds of intelligence are you able to derive out of it. What processes and methodologies have you innovated to bring that together?

Dmitri Williams: Let’s start with an academic one and maybe jump into some commercial ones. The first project that we did was on predictive analytics and we were doing this for the intelligence community. They were interested in looking at someone’s online behavior and understanding something about them offline. Those are all declassified stuff that you can read about online. We would take a look at someone playing a video game like EverQuest 2, which is the game that we were looking at most of the time. >>>