Building an Infrastructure Software Company — Q&A with Intelliment Security
Crane sat down with Sergio Pozo, the CEO of Intelliment Security, to talk about the opportunities arising in infrastructure software and the challenges of building an enterprise company founded in Europe.
What is Intelliment? Intelliment Security helps Network Engineering teams provide a self-service application connectivity platform to the enterprise, reducing firewall policy provisioning time from weeks to seconds. They help companies avoid making costly mistakes and ensuring the continuous enforcement of compliance guidelines. Intelliment works across both physical legacy infrastructure and virtualized ones, enabling them to speak to each other. They like to say that Intelliment has “democratized firewall policies, like Puppet or Chef did for IT infrastructure automation.”
When Crane led a seed round last summer, Intelliment didn’t have any paying customers, but had promising early discussions with large enterprises who were moving into proof of concept. Today, they have closed six figure ACV deals and are progressing with some of the world’s largest companies in financial services, media and gaming and are defining their own category in security automation.
Q: When you were working on your Ph.D., what was the moment you realized that your project needed to be a company?
I was always interested in abstracting SecOps and so I was showing different pieces of the technology as prototypes to industry people. It was here, when I was out of the lab, that I realized that there was value in combining all of these various pieces together for networking engineering. The networking market was also shifting to virtualization by that time.
I called my old friend, Eduardo, a brilliant engineer that I had known for years and said, “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for — let’s team up”. People at the University thought I was crazy — but we’ve proven there is huge demand in what we are building.
Q: What mistakes hurt you the most early on?
I remember an early conversation with a US VC who said we were in the wrong location. And he was right. We were a Spanish company with no market or investor reach out of Spain. We decided to move operations to London to have access to the biggest European customer and investor market, and to make the US more accessible for the company.
We were fortunate enough to get traction here in the UK as well as in the US, and we brought onboard some great investors to support us. We had failed at these two things in Spain. So my advice is don’t trust anyone who is telling you that you must succeed in your local market first. In our case, had we not branched out to London, we probably would have built the wrong product for the wrong people. Our existing customers are much more demanding in terms of pushing the limits of what is possible which resonates with our desire to build something big.
Q: What advice do you have for other founders in Europe building enterprise software, specifically on getting in front of customers in the US?
Although I’m not an expert in enterprise software sales (yet), I’ve definitely learned a lot. It takes many more months to demonstrate traction than I would have ever anticipated.
Enterprise sales for a Network Infrastructure product is not like selling the next CRM product. You can’t put an MVP on a Webpage and invest in marketing and expect to get thousands of users to learn from. It’s high-touch sales. We are fortunate enough to have an experienced enterprise sales person working with us across the UK and US who was able to open doors once we had completed the bulk of our customer development.
We now know how to target potential customers and how to talk about the problem that they suffer from. With our first customers closed, we are also now able to demonstrate a real ROI, which has been one of the single biggest drivers in new sales discussions. So don’t spend time selling to customers in the US face to face until you have reference customers in Europe and some early anecdotal evidence on ROI.
Q: What advice do you have for infrastructure software founders on getting to product market fit and growing faster?
In the early stages, you tend to think that you know what you are selling and to whom. The reality is that if you haven’t been exposed to a sufficiently large number of customers across many different verticals in a rapid period of time, then you probably haven’t learned this yet. The market evolves with you.
The most important things are 1) how the customers want to use the product and how it combines with existing processes’ 2) how the best conversations across different stakeholders can be built to accelerate sales 3) how to sell the future of your product and finally 4) who is going to pay and who is going to use it day to day. The technology you sell (the what) is only a small portion of the entirety of the product that they are buying from you.
Q: How did you decide to go straight for large enterprise customers?
Intelliment is a Security Operations, Risk, and Compliance platform. That means that it has different use cases for different teams within the enterprise. The largest enterprise customers in the world have given us the opportunity to focus on our first core product (though we really went to market with two different products), which is Network Security Policy Automation. It’s like Puppet or Chef, but for Security. There was some uncertainty when we were talking with our first 30 customers which ones would buy first, then we learned that the largest customers (in our case those with the most number of nodes) had a more pressing problem and had already dedicated budget mentally for this problem.
Q: What is your view on the future of IT Automation?
IT Automation is already a multi-billion dollar market. A subset of that is Security Automation, which is growing at more than double rate than IT Automation, which means that the market is being created by new entrants like Intelliment.
Today, the application is King, it’s the lifeblood of companies. The whole IT industry has shifted towards IT automation. Software teams are able to automate many stages of the software development life-cycle, and more recently Service Delivery teams are able to automate the IT infrastructure delivery and configuration, although a cultural shift was needed (what we now know as DevOps). Now it’s time for the Network infrastructure, including security as one of its main services. It’s the next natural step in the process to be able to fully automate the delivery of applications, keep costs down, and keep quality and security high.
Q: What does Intelliment look like five years from now?
We’re currently focused on helping Network Security Engineering teams to create an agile service for the enterprise ensuring quality and compliance. As we solve this problem, we continue to discover other use cases with our customers and we are very excited about some of the few features and products that we will be releasing this year and next. The long term vision is creating a big data query system to answer complex questions about network security operations and understanding how we can automate this even further using machine learning and AI.
