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. >>>

6 Podcasts with VCs Interested in Cloud Startups

Just as entrepreneurs brought computing from centralized mainframes to distributed desktop PCs and then to cloud computing, entrepreneurs continue to make their marks on various parts of the cloud. Without the support of venture capitalists and investors, much of this progression would not be possible. If your startup operates in the cloud, you would be wise to listen to this selection of 30-minute podcast interviews with VCs interested in cloud startups.

Brian Jacobs, Emergence Capital – General Partner, Brian discusses his views on where cloud opportunities are likely to be at this point. While we’re in a mature market, he is still bullish on innovation.
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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a little bit about your company. You’ve raised three rounds of financing. What’s the genesis of the company? What’s the story?

Sash Sunkara: We started the company in 2009. It was myself and Todd Matters. Our focus was on building a cloud management suite for the enterprises and building that bridge. We’d just gotten through 2008. Investments weren’t happening in a big way. A lot of VCs were just holding on and trying to make sure that they had enough funds for their current portfolio. We found a strategic partner that wanted the product for a different use. They put a couple of million dollars in. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You talked about security as your opening trend. You’re a vendor that’s providing a very comprehensive stack. Are your security capabilities your own or do you work with other vendors that are providing the security capability?

Sash Sunkara: Both. There is a certain level of security that is integrated into our product. We encrypt in a variety of ways in transit as well as at rest. However, we’re not a security software provider. We do integrate with several partners in providing a higher-level of security. As I mentioned, we do financial services as well as government entities. They have higher security >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you picking up from your customer base?

Sash Sunkara: There’s some immediate problems that enterprises are trying to solve. One of the biggest issues is security. I think the clouds have addressed that. They have the newest technologies. These are new data centers with the latest in encryption management. With current data centers, these data centers are aging. The software is aging. They’re finding that, “I’m probably better off going there.” >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Sash Sunkara, CEO of Rackware (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: A corollary question, whom do you see in deals?

Sash Sunkara: From a DR perspective, we often see Zerto. We used to see others too. Zerto has quite a strong foothold in the lower end service providers, more in the SMB space. We are starting to see some of them in enterprises. We’ve beaten them in quite a few of the enterprise deals. We do address enterprise complexity very well. In the cloud management space, we see competitors like Red Hat. In a pure migration deal, we sometimes we see Arasimi but not as much as we used to. There are internal tools as well. >>>