The Cloud model has extended well beyond its seeming origins in the CRM and Sales Force Automation (SFA) marketplace to reach out into areas such as HR and accounting. It's also making its presence felt in other mainstream IT infrastructure areas, such as email management and messaging. Mimecast is among the vendors pitching a SaaS offering in this space. BusinessCloud9 sat down with CEO Peter Bauer.
BusinessCloud9 (BC9): What's the big idea behind Mimecast?
Peter Bauer (PB): We had two big ideas with Mimecast. We have always worked in the messaging space. We've been building applications around the infrastructure space to make email more useful and aligned with the business processes. We recognised how complex the running of an email infrastructure was for many organisations while at the same time becoming more critically important email was becoming. We were seeing a whole lot of product vendors appearing around the mail server to shore up its capabilities. When internet email because prevalent, email systems were exposed. Email servers are where people tend to store stuff. From our point of view the question started to be whether we could write a piece of software that converged a number of different things around email. But if we were going to write this software, we would be picking a fight with lots of vendors.
BC9: So where does SaaS come into it?
PB: We needed to do something fundamentally different. We saw companies like Salesforce.com and Google and realised that we could run what we wanted to do as a service. We would be able to remove a number of the applications that a user needed, but could we remove the need to buy any applications at all? It took us about two and a half years to be able to do all the things that would be truly useful to an organisation. The first stage was to build an internet-based service and all the focus was on that. That developed a fair amount of traction. Now we know it's not just about The Cloud, although the likes of Salesforce.com and Google are saying that it's all about the clouds and the sky. That might well be the end game, but the next stage to focus on is the LAN.
Companies have made big investments in Exchange, but we have got some customers using services. Now the question is how we can take what we have in The Cloud and tightly integrate it with the LAN. We're talking about adding services that add value to their existing investments and habits of the user base. We have begun developing some deep integrations to Outlook and Microsoft Exchange. We can take Microsoft Outlook and make it into a fundamentally more powerful application. For example, Outlook is not so good at long term archiving and search. We tend to have large amounts of user data that we have been given or we have retained. In Outlook, when the user hits the search button, instead of going off to Exchange it searches a gird of Cloud Computing and then delivers results to Outlook on the ground.
BC9: Why does this idea resonate with CIOs today?
PB: People have this thing called we call LAN Clutter Fatigue Syndrome. They're just tired of putting more and more stuff on their LAN. Anything that can declutter the infrastructure but demonstrate that it's done well is going to be appealing. In the current economic climate, people can't afford to be constructing more things for themselves. CFOs are increasingly aware that IT people may not need all those boxes that they've said they do. IT people need to go and look at more services.
BC9: So does that imply that everything will head to The Cloud?
PB: There won' t be a winner takes all approach. It will end up with a segmented approach. People have existing infrastructure. The most powerful force will be end user interest. End users will have the best ideas. In the US, the end user is king; over here, IT people say that the end user has to do this or that. Certainly organisations will go purely to The Cloud, companies which are truly prepared to give it a go. But there is no doubt that there a certain pain associated with that. Google Apps is not comparable with Microsoft Office, for example. For most people, the question will be how to get the best of both worlds. What are the useful services that you can have in The Cloud and what services do you want on site. Continuity is an obvious one, for example. Most people will say that they want their continuity to be managed in their own data centres.
BC9: Is the term The Cloud helpful?
PB: The term The Cloud is the one that's taken hook and that helps us. SaaS has been an awkward term and on demand became a bit too IBM. As a name takes hold, everyone thinks it's the popular term to call it so anything and everything becomes The Cloud. What that points to is the fact that there's nothing especially different about Cloud Computing. It's just an evolution. It's just like when we used to talk about client server being the next big thing and it was the buzzword for everyone, then it just became all about IT again. The same thing will happen. The Cloud will just become IT again.
BC9: Mimecast is itself a Cloud Computing user, being a big NetSuite customer.
PB: We wanted to have a single system for customer records through marketing campaigns through to our sales force. Instead of hiring a lot of infrastructure people, we have two guys customising NetSuite to deliver the business results we need. We have heavily customised NetSuite. It is very mature as an application. I think we were fortunate in that when we started using NetSuite we were 15 people strong. Now we're 150 people strong. When you start with a clean slate and can choose where you start from, then it's easier than if you are a medium-sized company and have an accounting system in place. Then it's more difficult for the marketing guy or the sales guy to come along and say 'let's use this'.
