Saturday, April 09, 2005
Subscription software and Security
Yesterday i was lucky enough to meet with the VP of one of the biggest security firms in the world, as he just happens to live in Scotland (or at least has a base here).
He was amongst the first of what i hope will be many discussions with really clever, experienced people who can ask me all the difficult questions. I did show though - at points i felt fully in control - at other points i felt myself asking the same questions he was. I do have answers for most of them... the question is really whether those answers work for the people who run businesses (and how will buy TESARAC!).
I discussed my ideas on TESARAC and how we will operate using a subscription model - primarly anyway, although i suspect custom installs for corporates.
He discussed in depth the difficulty i may have in convincing companies to subscribe and hence have some quite important data stored remotely. I guess as you scale up adn talk with large enterprise this becomes more difficult. However, in order to break through in this world you gotta think different. If you scale out (ie. from enterprises to smaller companies), ths idea is that if you can prove you are secure enough then they will come to you. Not only that, but is the long tail is right, there may well be even more customers there anyway!
To do this consider how many companies trust the ISP to manage their email, rather than manage their own mail servers and so on. So there is some trust out there.
At TESARAC we are thinking about what models will work for each company. I like long tail because it works for entrepreneurs - question is, does it make money?
He was amongst the first of what i hope will be many discussions with really clever, experienced people who can ask me all the difficult questions. I did show though - at points i felt fully in control - at other points i felt myself asking the same questions he was. I do have answers for most of them... the question is really whether those answers work for the people who run businesses (and how will buy TESARAC!).
I discussed my ideas on TESARAC and how we will operate using a subscription model - primarly anyway, although i suspect custom installs for corporates.
He discussed in depth the difficulty i may have in convincing companies to subscribe and hence have some quite important data stored remotely. I guess as you scale up adn talk with large enterprise this becomes more difficult. However, in order to break through in this world you gotta think different. If you scale out (ie. from enterprises to smaller companies), ths idea is that if you can prove you are secure enough then they will come to you. Not only that, but is the long tail is right, there may well be even more customers there anyway!
To do this consider how many companies trust the ISP to manage their email, rather than manage their own mail servers and so on. So there is some trust out there.
At TESARAC we are thinking about what models will work for each company. I like long tail because it works for entrepreneurs - question is, does it make money?
