20 RED-HOT, PRE-IPO
COMPANIES IN 2015
B2B TECH
From Actifio to Vormetric, IDG Connect editorial director Martin Veitch
surveys companies with good prospects that have yet to float
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
IDG Connect
Introduction
In November 2014, IDG Connect published my inaugural red-hot, pre-IPO companies list which
examined my pick of 20 companies that were (a) privately held and (b) had a positive outlook. I made no
pretensions to scientific rigour but selected the companies on the basis of background research and a
decent amount of time spent with at least one senior executive at each company to give a fair view of its
chances.
Among the factors I sought out as signs of promise were: strong management; a clear and attractive
vision; funding; differentiated products or services; the good opinion of significant experienced
influencers; and a buoyant area of activity. I also added in a solid dose of ‘hunch’ based on over 25 years’
experience meeting technology leaders and writing about their companies’ inner workings.
A list like this is, of necessity, a snapshot. An attempt at an empirical study might have included many
others such as Dropbox, Square and Atlassian but there has to be a cut-off somewhere and I have
plumped for human interaction over desk research, distant third-party connections and hearsay. I make
no bones of the fact that this was very much a personal viewpoint.
Now, never one to change a winning formula, this year’s follow-up clones the 2014 format. It presents an
A to Z list with no weight given to one company over another. And I should emphasise again, that this is
not a paper that attempts to tip the success or otherwise of companies’ chances on the public markets.
I certainly don’t believe that all of these companies will eventually float although I contend that they all
have a chance to do so. Some, as backed up by last year’s list, will sell out to rivals and peers, others will be
taken in by private-equity partners and some might fail altogether.
The process of becoming a successful company is evolutionary and there are many different paths that
can be taken. A few, like SAS Institute, stay private for the long run. Many others are ‘built to flip’ and are
ready-made for a fast sale or are unavoidably drawn into the lures of a predator. A few, like Dell, go public
and then retract and recently we have seen big tech stocks like HP and Symantec announce plans to split
into component parts. But many of the most interesting set their sights on an initial public offering to
raise funds for the long-term, to reward staff and to bask in the limelight of the markets.
These last companies are at the heart of the technology economy but, with venture funding having been
at extraordinary levels for a few years now, some of the strongest have the luxury of biding their time and
waiting for the perfect moment to launch. So, all that’s left to say is best of luck to one and all of them.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
IDG Connect
Actifio
Anaplan
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Ash Ashutosh
Interview: CEO and CTO
A
W
Well-funded, addresses a pain point in a space
where current backup incumbents aren’t well
loved
Competing against stacks and their sales tactics
won’t be easy
ctifio is handsomely bankrolled with over
$207m at its disposal after a March 2014 round
pulled in $100m.
A storage and virtualisation company at heart,
based in the US (Waltham, Massachusetts) and
under Indian leadership, like Nutanix, PernixData
and Nimble Storage, Actifio matches the photo-fit
for the new datacentre disruptors.
Its USP is what it calls ‘Copy Data Management/
Virtualization’ by which it means splitting data from
infrastructure to improve resilience, lower costs
and provide built-in backup. CEO Ash Ashutosh
sees the company as the link between two new
types of company: those redefining infrastructure
(such as the disruptors listed above) and those
redefining applications like Salesforce.com,
NetSuite and Workday.
Its core intellectual property is in a deep
understanding of the workings of applications and
you might think of it as an application process logic
expert wedded to a super-sized enterprise version
of Apple’s Time Machine for backup and restore.
Its other advantage is that the traditional
incumbents in the enterprise backup space (many
of them acquired and rolled up into giant software
stacks) are seen by many CIOs and CTOs as bloodsucking leeches and innovation-free zones.
The latest funding valued Actifio at over $1bn and,
if market conditions are right, 2015 could see an
IPO.
Well-funded, focused on a profitable, important
niche
Some prospects will always lean to ‘stack’ providers
hat’s this? A hot British software startup
that’s not doing something ‘webby’ and isn’t
in London? Yes, and its global R&D is based near
York in England’s north country (although
confusingly it’s actual headquarters are San
Francisco). Anaplan is unusual in a few
other ways too.
Number one, it’s trying to disrupt the Excel
hegemony where Microsoft’s spreadsheet is asked
to do pretty well everything that it wasn’t created
to do – in this case keeping tabs on business
planning.
Number two, it has strong funding for a European
company, with about $150m raised so far and
illustrious customers to match including Air Asia,
Expedia, British Land, HP, Kimberly-Clark, McAfee
and Pandora.
Number three, it uses an Anglo-French
management combination with Brit CTO, Michael
Gould, working alongside the effusive Frederic
Laluyaux as CEO.
With a run rate already at over $100m in revenues
per year, Anaplan might not be a household name
and probably never will be, but it’s being carefully
watched by the giant software stack operators.
Those companies are also highly acquisitive of
course but a future IPO would make sense if
management and investors can hold their nerve.
The UK’s most important business software
company since Autonomy? Maybe.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
IDG Connect
BloomReach
Boundary
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Raj De Datta
Interview: CEO, Gary Read
C
ompanies attempting to be the great new
thing in eRetail come along with the frequency
of London buses and their chances of successfully
arriving at a desirable destination in a timely
manner are similarly mixed.
B
To tip the winners it’s perhaps better to look at
customer bases than get confused by whizzbang technologies and promises. With that in
mind, BloomReach has pulled in Staples, fashion
trendsters Forever 21 and Guess, and foodie nexus
Williams-Sonoma.
In April 2014, Boundary nearly doubled its funding
to over $41m and in so doing enhanced its chances
of challenging the long-term incumbents in the
space such as CA, BMC, HP, IBM and Quest Software
(now part of Dell). Those companies won’t be easy
to usurp but then Salesforce knocked Siebel off its
perch.
Desirable market with customers who itch for new
insights
Many silver bullets have already been promised in
eRetail
Chasing growth, the San Francisco company set up
a UK office in 2014 and has $41m in funding.
Modern alternative to incumbents in a space that
needs refreshing
Buyer inertia
oundary is an IT monitoring company that wants
to do for its chosen space what Salesforce.com
did for CRM. That is, provide a modern, cloud-based,
user-friendly product that will be beloved by users...
and lead to enormous financial success.
Many of the new wave of companies that have made
life difficult for segment leaders are led by people
who know where bodies are buried. Salesforce CEO,
Marc Benioff, was formerly an Oracle executive
and ServiceNow founder Fred Luddy was CTO at
Peregrine Systems, for example. Boundary is no
exception as British CEO, Gary Read, has eaten the
monitoring pizza and worn the monitoring T-shirt at
Boole & Babbage, BMC, RiverSoft and Nimsoft.
Read’s challenge today is to reinvent the category,
giving it a modern sluicing for a complex new era
where companies will mix and match capabilities
on-premises and off-premise across global, hybrid
environments - but still want a single cockpit on all
activities with reporting that make sense to nontechies too.
Enterprises and service providers make up
Boundary’s customer roster and range from Jive,
Expedia and Okta to Adobe and Outbrain – not bad
for a company founded in December 2010. Read
aspires to an eventual IPO although the company
and market are still growing. If Boundary can match
ambition to execution it should have an outstanding
chance of success.
On a minor note, its logo is clever in concept but
illegible…
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
Cirba
IDG Connect
Cloudera
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO and CTO
Interview: Chief Strategic Officer,
Mike Olson
A
E
Timely solution to a pressing challenge for
datacentre owners/operators
Has been a slow burn so far and is dwarfed by
others in the datacentre automation space
t the ripe old age of 15, Cirba is no new
game in town by software standards but its
time might have come. The Canadian company
likens itself to the computer game Tetris – but
that doesn’t mean that it is intensely annoying
and beloved of dweebs. Instead it provides
the automation capability to allot time and
capacity to virtual machines in heavily virtualised
environments. And of course, most well-run
datacentres are going to be heavily virtualised
today – and they will be even more so tomorrow.
In recent years Cirba has bolstered partnerships
and its status as an ‘indie’ makes it appeal to those
reluctant to be locked in to a single supplier’s
environment. However, to capitalise on its
opportunity it may have to invest in marketing and
expansion. The company last raised funds in 2012
and has collected $32m in total. It is also likely to
be an attractive partnering (and perhaps more)
target for the well-known firms duking it out for
datacentre automation clout.
Able to invest freely in growth; tight with the
world’s biggest chip maker
Closeness to Intel might not make it universally
popular
ven among those mentally exhausted by – and
insanely envious of – the vast funding rounds
that have characterised tech VC over the last
couple of years, Cloudera sent jaws falling in 2014
when it announced Intel was taking an 18% stake
in this Palo Alto, California bright spark for $740m.
That took total investments to over $1bn and
overnight made Cloudera appear to be the B2B
world’s riposte to the WhatsApp valuation when
Facebook agreed to buy the messaging firm.
Intel was buying a chunk of a company at the heart
of what’s going on in the Hadoop/Big Data action.
And, just as it did when it took a lucrative share in
VMware several years earlier, Intel was betting that
what we see today are just the skirmishes in what
will turn out to be a brutal battle for control of the
next wave of critical analysis tools. In Cloudera’s
case the result will be decision-support systems
capable of asking the world’s biggest ‘what if’
questions.
Cloudera’s biggest rival, Hortonworks, on the other
hand is proudly going its own way and has already
put IPO wheels in motion. Both can win of course
but the company that becomes number-one in the
enterprise stands to become very large indeed.
Some compare what’s happening here with the
tussle for RDBMS leadership 20-odd years ago and
speak of the winner becoming the next Oracle. If
they’re right we might one day talk about Intel and
other investors getting a bargain.
The sheer heft of these investments points clearly
to an eventual IPO but then again Cloudera now
has plenty of time to invest. And money of course
– lots of it.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
Coupa
IDG Connect
Devicescape
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Rob Bernshteyn
Interview: CEO, David Fraser
C
S
Market is ready for a new approach to spend
management
Inertia among stack users and freebie offers from
rival vendors
oupa is a spend-management company that
ticks a lot of boxes in matrices that correlate
‘characteristics’ with ‘success’ today. It’s cloud/
subscription-based, it operates in a dusty category
that could use some sprucing up and it’s got
decent funding – $89m to date.
You could go further: it’s young, having been
founded in 2006, and it’s Silicon Valley Californian,
with a San Mateo base, that puts it within whistling
distance of the three companies it would like to
join in cloud computing application royalty –
Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite.
Coupa CEO Rob Bernshteyn won his spurs at
Siebel, SuccessFactors and in consulting, where
he studied earlier efforts at spend-management
such as Ariba. His big vision at Coupa is to
democratise and pluralise spending so more of it
falls into the hands of non-specialists rather than
power users, but also that that spending process
becomes transparent, auditable and can be swiftly
authorised.
Bernshteyn sees the spend-management market
opportunity as being in the $15-20bn range.
Biting off a few per cent of that pie would make
Coupa a sizeable outfit and give the company the
opportunity to join its icons. An October 2014
partnership with NetSuite suggests it is already
becoming an accepted companion of the online
aristocracy.
Interesting IP and concept
Slow progress to date
an Francisco-based Devicescape is maybe an
odd company for a list like this. It’s not a startup,
having been around since 2000, and its USP is
slightly offbeat and unusual as it harnesses WiFi in
hospitality spaces to deliver bolstered connectivity
to devices where cellular network speeds can’t cut
it.
You might call the approach scavenging although
the company prefers ‘crowdsharing’ – and despite
a slow start in its current guise, things may be
looking up. Devicescape only won its first carrier
customer in 2010 and then waited until 2013 when
10 came along at once.
The formula is attractive: users get faster links,
hospitality bosses get to market to prospective
guests, carriers don’t get crunched on capacity. It’s
been a while coming, but Devicescape might have
found its time.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
DocuSign
IDG Connect
ForgeRock
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Keith Krach
Interview: CEO, Mike Ellis
Advisor, Scott Mcnealy
Already changing the authorisation of transactions
A security compromise could be traumatic
T
hat DocuSign’s electronic signature platform is
rapidly becoming a de facto standard globally
is backed up by the fact that the most recently
announced funding round – $115m, taking the
total to $230m – includes money from Australia
and Japan.
It may seem absurd that it has taken this long for
eSignatures to find their level but let that pass:
DocuSign is growing quickly to become the leader
in its space and it is already becoming the widely
adopted way to sign off transactions. If it continues
on its current trajectory it stands to become the
modern answer to sealing wax and fingerprint, and
the transactions world’s equivalent to Adobe PDF
in document exchange.
DocuSign also benefits from enthusiastic
customers and in Keith Krach it has a founder and
CEO who has seen it all before, having been a
wunderkind executive at GM and built up a longterm success at spend-management company
Ariba with valuable experience in the rollercoaster
vagaries of the public markets. Ariba was once
valued at well over $30bn, even if SAP paid a
relatively modest $4.3bn to acquire it in 2012. An
IPO seems a natural conclusion to the company’s
progress so far.
Deep enterprise experience in identity
management
Competition comes from all angles
I
dentity management in all its forms has such a
large field of startups and veterans that it has
begun to resemble the famous Grand National
horse race where dozens of beasts compete over a
range of daunting obstacles. It’s an endurance test
requiring judgment, an understanding of prevailing
conditions, strong strategy, experienced jockeyship
and no small degree of luck.
ForgeRock, however, is an easy runner to recognise,
with a strong lineage, stable and experienced
trainers. OK, stretched metaphor over...
The company has its roots in Sun Microsystems’
IDM/IAM technology which is now open-sourced
after having been orphaned when Oracle bought
Sun. ForgeRock’s approach is to take a grownup enterprise-hardened approach to the tough
security and access questions being asked of large
companies everywhere, and to answer them with
scalability assured.
The approach has garnered $52m in VC and the
company even has a secret weapon – the quotetastic former Sun CEO Scott McNealy who acts as an
advisor, door-opener to prospects, and toastmaster.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
Okta
IDG Connect
OneLogin
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Todd McKinnon
Interview: CEO, Thomas Pedersen
Cloud login analysis
Well funded, strong awareness, tight partnering
strategy
Lots of rivals, will lose out to stack approaches
when facing some larger prospects
O
f all the startups associated with single signon and identity management in the cloud era,
San Francisco-based Okta probably has created the
biggest buzz. It has the requisite funding, a young
CEO with a good CV (ex-Salesforce.com) in the case
of Todd McKinnon, and plenty of money to foster
growth - $155m and counting.
However, the company might be more traditional
than it looks: it takes a classical enterprise sales
approach and it has to cover the on-premise
world as well as being the guardsman to cloud
applications.
It has also taken the trouble to build go-to-market
relationships and integrations that go beyond
press-release promises. Box, Salesforce, NetSuite,
Workday and ServiceNow are among its confreres.
Customers include many hyper-growth tech firms
but also the likes of Chiquita, National Geographic,
Gatwick Airport, Rotary International and Pabst
Brewing Company.
Narrow focus, international perspective
Might lack muscle to defend its territory
L
ike misery, according to the old adage, startups
with enormous ambition tend to love company.
In the identity management and single sign-on
world there’s no shortage of company of course
and you might think of OneLogin as Tweedledum
to Okta’s Tweedledee: a company with similar goals
in IDM/SSO but it has rather different ways of going
about things.
Founded in 2009, OneLogin is of Danish extraction
with Thomas Pedersen, formerly of Zendesk, as CEO
- even if, as with Okta, its HQ is in the Californian
sun. Like many companies with non-US leadership,
OneLogin already feels international and in early
2014 it opened datacentre space in London and
Amsterdam. Given what happened with Edward
Snowden, NSA, RSA, PRISM and so on, that now
seems rather prescient.
Focused on execution, scalability and with perhaps
more of a cloud orientation than most peers,
OneLogin has raised a relatively modest $18m in
funds but says it is already cashflow positive. Most
importantly it has real, living, breathing customers
like recruitment group Reed.co.uk, PBS, Netflix,
Stanford University, Condé Nast, Uber and GoPro
tooting its horn.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
PernixData
IDG Connect
Pure Storage
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: PernixData, CTO
Interview: CEO, Scott Dietzen
Simple upgrade path for storage systems
Perception of a band-aid solution
I
f you were building a storage dream team for
the new age of heavily virtualised, automated,
dynamic, low-latency, I/O-centric storage
networking you might look for CVs from engineers
high up at VMware and with experience of modern
enterprise server, interconnect and storage
approaches. On that front, PernixData scores with
its senior management fresh out of the 800-pound
gorilla of virtualisation software.
Like VMware, PernixData wants it all. Its
opportunity is to be pervasive and ubiquitous,
layering over and slithering across datacentres
regardless of the hardware brands its software sits
upon. Its real promise, as so often in modern server
rooms, is to abstract storage networking elements
in order to create a faster design without having
to ask computer designers, or CIOs who buy from
them, to start over. Again the VMware comparison
is valid: decouple under the hood to provide a
smarter upgrade path.
The San Jose-based company is already part of
the new datacentre furniture, despite being less
than three years old. It has raised a modest sum
compared to others ($62m) but then its R&D is
in place and it has no datacentres or hardware
designs to factor in.
A sign of PernixData’s popularity is that others
are already smearing it by suggesting it is a
quick-fix but customers beating a path to its door
suggest the company has built a highly desirable
mousetrap.
A pioneer that is riding the wave of demand for
Flash enterprise storage
The storage giants are fighting back with
everything they have
L
ike PernixData, Pure Storage is closely aligned
with Flash media. The Silicon Valley company
already has a big reputation in building very fast
storage networks that build on the solid-state
technology.
Like others in the sector, its rise has been sudden
and it claims to be the fastest growing company
of all. Bold words, but there’s no doubt that the
company has built a roster of clients and a list of
investors desperate to be in on the action.
With revenues of over $100m per year it could float
quickly but it is using its large VC treasure chest of
$475m to take its own sweet time and enjoy life
outside the glare of the stock watchers’ arc lights.
This is probably a smart idea, considering how
some earlier IPOs like Violin Memory struggled
immediately post-float.
With attitude to match its fat wad, Pure is taking
aim at the “refrigerator-sized” incumbents or, as it
doubtless sees them, relics of the old datacentre.
Its not-so-secret sauce lies in having developed
ground-up around Flash. That primes it for the
algo-trader and his ilk but also many other buyers
in need of raw speed – and as Flash prices fall, its
ambit should become even broader.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
SimpliVity
IDG Connect
Skyhigh Networks
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Doron Kempel
Interview: CEO, Rajiv Gupta
Broad hyperconverged stack
Squeezed between startups and giants
M
any companies attempt to throw some fairy
dust on their CEOs by telling tales of their
derring-do as sporting heroes and so on. SimpliVity
CEO Doron Kempel has a remarkable story to tell
- he led a mission to assassinate Saddam Hussein but he probably wishes he didn’t have to tell it.
The story of Kempel’s former life gets in the way
of the SimpliVity story in the same way that an
elephant on the table would cause issues at
a wedding buffet. That’s a shame because (1)
Kempel’s IT track record in building Diligent
Technologies, sold to IBM in 2008, is more germane
and (2) the company has some of the most
ambitious technology of any of those stalking the
new datacentres.
SimpliVity takes the integrated infrastructure, or
converged system, concept further than perhaps
anybody, layering on capabilities from caching
to WAN optimisation via de-duplication, data
virtualisation and backup.
The result has seen plaudits from Kleiner Perkins
luminary John Doerr who called SimpliVity’s
Omnicube appliance “one of the biggest
innovations in enterprise computing since
VMware”. Like Victor Kiam with Remington shavers,
Doerr liked the company so much that he put
his company’s money into it and became one of
the investors that gave SimpliVity a total of over
$101m in funds and the unusually long gestation
period Kempel says was needed for such a
complex project.
Earlier this year, reports suggested HP was keen
to buy SimpliVity for a price our sources say was
in the $700m range. If SimpliVity suceeds, the
company won’t want for suitors or other options.
Unique selling proposition that is timely
Need to convince buyers of robustness and stay up
to date
I
t’s an old chestnut (but true) that technology
moves so fast these days that it’s hard even for the
best CIOs to see more than a blur of activity, never
mind take into account all of the risk/reward factors
that come with new code and kit. Not wanting
to miss a trick or expose themselves to risk, they
therefore equip themselves with teams of helpers:
CTOs, CISOs, architects, consultants and analysts.
But in an age of skunkworks, freemium services,
Shadow IT, BYOD, cloud downloads and more, even
that throw-bodies-at-the-problem approach might
not be enough.
Enter, from Cupertino in California, near Apple,
Skyhigh Networks, with its systematic counsel for
cloud applications, providing a risk level register
that tells IT bosses what they’ve got and what is
their exposure.
It’s an interesting model even if only time will tell
how valuable enterprises find Skyhigh’s advice.
Since we spoke to CEO Rajiv Gupta in May 2014
the company has picked up an additional $40m
in funding, taking its pot to over $66m. Gupta has
exited startups before for up to $100m and says he
has higher hopes for this project – like many CEOs
he wants to build a Salesforce.com-like company
with legs to last the long term.
It’s an intriguing concept but keeping up to date
with the changing landscape will be a challenge
and you might argue that this is a job for a panindustry consortium or some other third-party.
However, Skyhigh is winning word-of-mouth
attention and respect.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
Sophos
IDG Connect
Splice Machine
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO, Kris Hagerman
Interview: CEO, Monte Zweben
I
S
Excellent reputation; differentiated demographic
Enterprise market mostly goes to biggest security
firms
n a business famous (notorious?) for its
salesmanship and heavy-duty marketing, Sophos
is exceptional for its soft-handed approach to the
hot potato of infosecurity. It’s also focused on small
and medium-sized businesses while all around it
in enterprise security – and beyond – look to the
buyers with the deepest pockets. And finally, its
UK headquartered, even if its CEO resides in Silicon
Valley.
Sophos has a strong marque among security
professionals and lots of distinctiveness compared
to the old guard of Symantec, McAfee et al. Being
privately held has given it room to manoeuvre and
go its own way – migrating security management
capabilities largely to the cloud, for example.
Sophos seems a classic case of a private
company (it’s protected by Apex Partners) that
moves without duress but when I met CEO, Kris
Hagerman, in September 2014 he seemed keen
on an eventual IPO, albeit without any rushing or
undue hullabaloo – very Sophos.
New funding could give Sophos the chance to
raise its game a league and there is plenty of
headroom for it to explore geographic growth.
In a hot space with a sharp position promising fast
ROI
Another dense market where wheat has yet to be
separated from chaff
plice Machine’s interesting name comes from the
way it splices together information threshed by
its analytics engine. CEO Monte Zweben, worked
on the Space Shuttle programme, founded and led
Blue Martini, once a hotter than hot eCommerce
high-flier, and sees scope for his latest venture to
disrupt database incumbents. His timing is good
as the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft are rocked
by the forces of NoSQL, Cassandra/open source,
Big Data and the rise of lowball-priced commodity
servers and storage.
Founded in 2012, San Francisco-based Splice
Machine has picked up $22m in funding. Cracking a
big hole in the enormous RDBMS market is almost
rocket science but taking a slice of the emerging
new database sector is a mission that could be
accomplished.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
Teradici
IDG Connect
Vormetric
For:
For:
Against:
Against:
Interview: CEO and Founder,
Dan Cordingley
Interview: CEO, Alan Kessler
T
T
Timely and well-supported by major OEMs
Likely to be challenged by those same OEMs
eradici is no spring chicken. A 10-year-old
Canadian company based in Burnaby, British
Columbia, it has taken a while to become fullyfledged but this could be a good time for the
thin-client, server-based computing mantra that it
espouses.
Founder and CEO Dan Cordingley has a plan you
could write on a matchbox. Take everything that
was wrong in the network computer model and fix
it. That means doing all the hard work at the server
end, monitoring network performance in real time,
and identifying image types for faster prioritisation
and processing.
With a background at Level One and Intel after the
latter acquired the former, Cordingley’s CV is good
for this task and its execution in both software
and silicon. In recent years, Teradici has built up a
formidable array of OEMs including VMware, Dell,
HP, IBM and Fujitsu, selling software, thin-client
computers and even screens. The rise of tablets
and smartphones as clients won’t hurt either.
After doing the hard lifting in those early years,
Teradici also has some strong IP and it won’t be
easy for even the big companies to catch up on
the R&D front. If ‘thin is in’, Teradici has plenty of
headroom for growth. Cordingley would like an
eventual IPO but is realistic enough to know that
his company could end up prey and his levelheaded approach is admirable.
Security space has never been more lucrative nor
in-demand
Modest funding, differentiation
he Edward Snowden/NSA/PRISM/RSA brouhaha
has led to many outcomes, both good and bad
but for the information security sector it was binary
manna from heaven. Vormetric’s angle is a sound
one even if it is really a re-tread of what used to be
a self-evident truth: it is the enemy within who is
often the biggest threat to your secrets.
Vormetric’s security ethos is predicated on the
idea that you protect what’s most important and
prioritise effectively. If it was safeguarding a house it
might concede that a burglar steal the milk bottles
and the newspaper in the letterbox, even the TV set
in extremis, but the family jewels will remain safe
and sound. Vormetric does this by restricting access:
Snowden had a trusted status as a contractor and
therefore access – and that might well have been
mistake number-one.
At 13 years old and modestly funded to the tune of
$20m, this Silicon Valley company is more likely to
be sucked into one of the M&A-voracious enterprise
security giants than to float but, either way, it is part
of the zeitgeist.
20 Pre-IPO Tech Companies 2015
IDG Connect
Conclusion
There’s no shortage of self-proclaimed experts, pundits, observers, analysts and others willing to
prognosticate on technology IPOs. It’s a sphere of activity that has generated billions of dollars for a few
geniuses, a great number of risk takers and a host of their supporters. But it’s also a world that lures many,
many more hangers-on who are desperate for a piece of the action, whether that’s a fiscal return or just
the chance to vicariously shine.
For the last couple of years the going has been good for technology IPOs as a series of technological
inflexion points have created opportunities for young companies. And any survey of the landscape
would have to include cloud computing, mobile computing and communications, collaboration, social
networks, security, Big Data and bring-your-own-device schemes.
However, at the same time, there are fears that the bubble, having expanded and expanded, will shortly
pop, such are the valuations that have been placed on companies before and after their market debuts.
In a way, we could just dismiss all this as froth but these valuations affect newer companies’ ability to
compete with the largest players and to provide ICT buyers with alternatives to the status quo. A healthy
IPO market goes hand-in-hand with the acceptable face of capitalism.
One final note, although Alibaba dwarfed other technology IPOs in 2014 this list remains stubbornly
US-centric. This is in part my own fault for not having the knowledge of more companies from across
the world and the time to summon and summarise more deserving Asian, African, Middle Eastern, Latin
American and Australian countries. However, it was notable that even Alibaba itself ultimately elected
to float on the US market. As globalisation continues it is to be hoped that the technology IPO market
also becomes a truly worldwide phenomenon. That would be yet another twist in the remarkable saga of
technology companies and their journeys toward making the world a smarter place.
About IDG Connect
IDG Connect is the demand generation division of International Data Group (IDG), the world’s largest
technology media company. Established in 2005, it utilises access to 38 million business decision makers’
details to unite technology marketers with relevant targets from any country in the world. Committed
to engaging a disparate global IT audience with truly localised messaging, IDG Connect also publishes
market specific thought leadership papers on behalf of its clients, and produces research for B2B
marketers worldwide. www.idgconnect.com