Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Secure-24 Co-CTOs, Scott McIsaac and Sean Donaldson (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Give me a sense of the competitive landscape. We know this market reasonably well. If you could help us understand who are your direct competitors are, that would be great.

Sean Donaldson: There’re a lot of companies who do SAP really well. There’re also others who do Oracle really well. We’re probably the only business under the billion dollar large IBM-type organization that has this breadth of application expertise. That’s where we really differentiate ourselves. We have the flexibility and the nimbleness of a smaller organization but the capability of an IBM or Xerox.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did you fund the company?

Assaf Rappaport: The company started with an investment from Sequoia Capital.

Sramana Mitra: So you raised concept financing from Sequoia?

Assaf Rappaport: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s very unusual. How did you manage to do that? That’s happening very rarely nowadays in the industry. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the security budgets, security has always been an active area. Part of it is because there are all sorts of creative ways in which hackers tend to find ways to penetrate organizations. Also, there’s the constantly changing architectural issues. The whole cloud thing is relatively new. There is a constant flow of innovation that happens in security. As a result, the security office at large enterprises have to deal with a lot of different things all the time, and buy technologies from startups like yourself all the time. They’ve been quite comfortable doing that.

However, one thing that has always been true about the security purchase process is that there are priorities. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The enterprise that is a customer of Salesforce, when it decides to access Salesforce.com, would access it through the Adallom network.

Assaf Rappaport: Exactly. Bank of America or EMC who are using Salesforce, or Box, or whatever software applications they’re using; it’s their data that we are protecting. Of course, we are collaborating with SaaS providers in order to provide value to their customers. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 2)

Assaf Rappaport:  Let’s take an example. I’m accessing the application from my home from an unmanaged device. So end point security is not going to be relevant. I could be accessing it through a public network, Internet café, or my own private network. All your perimeters, firewall, IDS, and other good stuff that you invested in to protect your on-premise and network are no longer relevant. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Assaf Rappaport, CEO of Adallom (Part 1)

Cloud adoption in the enterprise is opening up new security gaps. Assaf and his team have identified a major one and convinced Sequoia to concept-finance the venture. Very interesting articulation of cloud security issues facing enterprises!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as Adallom. What are you doing? What specifically are the trends that you’re aligning with within the cloud computing space?

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Matthew Dornquast, CEO of Code42 (Part 1)

This interview puts the spotlight on a very interesting topic: how companies that primarily monetize through their enterprise/B2B business and use B2C offerings to test software as well as to generate leads. In the cloud storage business, we’re seeing very interesting trends, and Matthew explains the rationale and the analysis very well. Great conversation!

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about yourself as well introduce our audience to Code42.

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: San Francisco is very expensive right now but I don’t think it’s as expensive as London or New York.

Peter Bauer: I do have some funny stories. During the interviewing process, there were some guys living in Spain. You realize that these are top class. You get talking about pay and ask for their expectations. Then they say, “Maybe 40,000 pounds a year.” You have to say, “I don’t know how to put this, but we’re going to have to insist that you take at least 55,000 pounds.” They say, “Wow!” Then you would say to him, “Come over here. Look for a flat.” >>>