Click here for Part I, Part II & Part IV

Protecting enterprise and government networks against millions of cyber threats every day

Suzanne Magee is the co-founder and chief evangelist officer of Bandura Systems. Chris Fedde is the company’s CEO. Headquartered in Columbia, MD and Lake St. Louis, MO, Bandura Systems is the creator of the PoliWall® TIG™ (Threat Intelligence Gateway), a comprehensive security platform designed to help enterprise and government networks combat emerging cyber threats. The company’s first TIG was developed for the US Department of Defense. Now, Bandura offers its automated, scalable product to businesses, agencies, and institutions seeking to protect their sensitive data without diverting staff resources.

EDWIN WARFIELD: You mentioned this is a platform that can scale to organizations of all sizes. What’s your business model?

CHRIS FEDDE: The main one business model today is really the main one that most security companies follow, which is the customer buys the appliance and then buys a subscription to the appliance. This subscription is one year, two years, three years, and in there is your tech support, your maintenance, and any subscription services you need—in our case the threat intelligence is in there. So, the main model is buy the product and then buy the subscription that sustains the product, and those are annually renewed, or two- or three-year renewals. That’s what most security companies offer. What we also offer is you can buy the whole thing as a subscription, just roll it all together. You don’t buy anything, you don’t take ownership of anything, a product is brought on premise and it’s operationalized and all the other things that you’d normally get in a subscription are also in there, so it makes it very simple for them to just say yes, and make it simple to acquire, simple to fit into their budgets. And most customers are starting to think that way anyway—they are moving things to the cloud, which is based on a subscription basis usually—so, it makes it very comfortable for them and the trends they are experiencing in their purchasing habits.

As we introduce the truly virtualized product, so that the appliance itself isn’t required, then that opens the door to the virtualized world, which includes infrastructures that are on-prem—but virtualized for economic reasons—as well as folks that have moved or are moving their infrastructure into the cloud. So, the value statement of the PoliWall doesn’t change. It’s still ingests all the threat intelligence, uses the threat intelligence to block known threats from ever hitting the network, and does it in a highly granular way, so it can be managed. And now, whether it’s hardware that they purchased, hardware that they’d subscribed to, or they put in the cloud, it’s all the same value statement. I think you’ll see most of the security vendors are kind of going that way anyway; we’re just going in there very quickly because that’s the trend we think is irreversible—it’s a good trend, it works in the advantage of the customers—and so we just want to be ahead of that.

Q. Chris, you’re relatively new to Bandura. What made you decide to come on as CEO?

CHRIS FEDDE: Every opportunity has its own unique elements to it, and so I’ve had the advantage in my life of seeing small and medium, large companies, and growing, so I really know what I enjoy and I know what to look for if I’m going to join any company. What I saw in Bandura is a lot of extremely beneficial timing. If you look at the technology, the problems it solves, the market is ready for, market timing is so critical in all these decisions. In this case, the market understands threat intelligence, they just don’t know how to use it, because they couldn’t use it. So, the timing was there, the company itself was in a state that I myself really enjoy—you know, a 20, 30, 40, 50% company is a exciting time of the company’s life, and that’s the point where we are now is we’re heading up that ramp up right now. So, the timing of the product, the market readiness, the size of the company to me just came together to be a very attractive package.

And I just love listening to Suzanne and how she got to where it is. She agreed to stay, because we need that hard driving pioneer out there that really understands how to make inroads and how to get this message out. When she agreed to stay as an executive, I agreed to come on board and lead the near future here.

I mentioned that timing was coming together to make this unique and really excellent opportunity for me. One of those elements is: Is this really technology that is sustainable? Is the advantage sustainable? Is the technology that makes it one of a kind today still going to be technology that makes it unique, that leads to unique capabilities in the out years? To understand that, I looked in detail—and this is before I came on board—I looked in detail at the intellectual property that Bandura had, I looked at the intellectual property that some of the competitors had, and determined that we in fact did have patents that were going to protect our future. So, it became more than just being very smart technologically; it’s guarded technology. It does say that even as other companies realize the value of having and being in the threat intelligence gateway business, we still have advantages that they can’t overcome. And so all those patents that Suzanne and her cofounder have acquired on behalf of Bandura are a sustaining element of why this is going to be a long-term business for threat intelligence gateways.

Connect with Chris and Suzanne on LinkedIn

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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