Thought Leaders in Internet of Things: Greenwave Systems CEO Martin Manniche (Part 1)

IoT is moving right along, here is a comprehensive discussion on some use cases and solutions from Greenwave Systems that are real and active.

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

Martin Manniche: I’m the Chairman and CEO of Greenwave Systems. We’re a managed services platform company. We are located and headquartered in Irvine, California. We see ourselves as a global company. We have an Asian headquarters in Singapore. We have the European headquarters in Denmark and Scandinavia. We have branch offices in Korea, San Jose, and India.

More and more people in the telco space or people who build managed services platforms or have a managed network are looking to have a  horizontal-built platform. This is a platform where everyone can participate and build services one top of the platform without understanding anything else and how they are interfacing with an API and be able to build a user experience on top of that. >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What level of revenue did you get to before the LSI acquisition?

Nelson Nahum: I think we were in the $10 million range.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you sell for?

Nelson Nahum: It’s confidential. It was good for most of the people.

Sramana Mitra: So the bottomline is that you made some money off that transaction?

Nelson Nahum: Yes, definitely. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What is the financing history beyond that $2 million Fidelity and General Catalyst round?

Andre Durand: I would say after about two years roughly, in very traditional fashion, we started raising money to fuel our growth. I think we raised about $30 million in total between 2003 and 2012. In 2013, we made a decision to switch our business model from a perpetual software license to a subscription business model.

Sramana Mitra: You waited till 2013 to make that shift?

Andre Durand: We did for a couple of reasons. Number one is we were selling infrastructure to big enterprises. While they are open to buying applications on a subscription model, their infrastructure decisions are measured in 3 to 10 year increments. They didn’t really want to be buying infrastructure and visiting a subscription decision every year. Almost all of their infrastructure was purchased on a very traditional basis. That was number one.

Number two was that it wasn’t until we began offering our own cloud service that our own business model was bifurcated. We knew that was not optimal. We >>>

Leveraging Amazon To Build a Cloud Storage Business: Nelson Nahum, CEO of Zadara Storage (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Nelson has built an interesting enterprise storage company and one of his key strategic moves was an unusual deal with Amazon.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Nelson Nahum: I was born in Uruguay. I immigrated to Israel to study in college. Back in the 80s, Uruguay was governed by junta. It was not very nice to stay there. Me and my brother moved to Israel with little money to study engineering. I got accepted into the university. The first thing that I liked in Israel was the freedom that everybody had. It was totally new for me because I grew up in a dictatorship kind of environment.

Sramana Mitra: What did you study?

Nelson Nahum: Engineering. First of all, I studied Hebrew. After a few months, I got accepted into an engineering school in Technion University. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: With that General Catalyst money, you said 2006 was when you had the server?

Andre Durand: 2005 was when it came out. We used the General Catalyst money, in essence, to build the first commercial product. The first one probably took us about 18 months.

Sramana Mitra: When did American Express hit?

Andre Durand: They actually licensed our toolkit—the open source precursor to the commercial server. We had some customers that were licensing our toolkit capabilities. We weren’t licensing the software at that time. We were really just licensing our professional services to implement the software.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone from here on? >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Lift yourself to the 30,000 foot industry perspective level. If you were to start a company in cyber security today, what open problem would you focus on?

Manoj Leelanivas: I would start with data. The issue right now is basically that there is too much data. People are struggling to find information from data. There is too much data out there and you don’t know what to process and what is meaningful for you. If I were to look at it with a blank slate, I would look at something that is in the boundaries of multiple industries.

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking you a question purely from a cyber security point of view. We have a huge Big Data coverage. Tell me specifically what is an open problem in cyber security that is worth following today. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There is a window before your system is able to figure things out when something may have gotten into the enterprise, but then you would know that something has gotten into the enterprise and do something about it. Is that correct?

Manoj Leelanivas: Yes. The beauty of it is that it doesn’t matter what the exploit is. You need to find out what the implication is. If somebody downloaded something by accidentally clicking on the site, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is infected. If that person downloaded and opened the file, then that person probably is infected, but that doesn’t mean that something has happened in the enterprise. If now it’s propagating to a high-value target, it is not a millisecond thing.

We really are going out for these targeted attacks, which have a long dwell time. It takes almost a year for them to find the target. It took almost three months to actually become the real attack. These are the ones that are slow, sophisticated, and trying to go after your crowned jewels. They’re going after the intellectual property. That’s what we predict. If you’re a large bank, it could be the customer data or the financial data, which can have huge implications on the market. We focus on the ones that have dwell time, target you, and put you on the newspaper. That is what we focus on. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Manoj Leelanivas, CEO of Cyphort (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The example you gave about the propagated malware, does that mean that your system scans every ad that comes into the screen of any employee of your client enterprise?

Manoj Leelanivas: Yes, anything that is coming to an employee on any of the vectors. In this case, it’s going to a web page.

Sramana Mitra: It could be mobile as well.

Manoj Leelanivas: It could be a mobile as well. Let me just siphon off things into two different parts. One is say you’re on a Windows or a Mac machine and you’re doing web surfing or email, we can see that right there because it’s coming through the enterprise. If it’s the mobile device on WiFi, we see it through the enterprise too. For a mobile device that is completely encrypted that is not on the enterprise, we cannot see it. >>>