You’ve been at iPass for around two and a half years now and joined when the company was going through a tough patch.
I was brought in by the board and some dissenting shareholders to take a look at the business and decide what to do with it. It was going through a difficult time. I came on board just as the economy tanked. There had been a process run by Morgan Stanley looking into selling the company and I acted as a consultant to the board during that process. When the company didn’t get sold they asked me to come in and run it.
I think the board was looking for a couple of things: they felt iPass as a company had under-delivered on its technology promise; it had been run by people who were largely telecom executives. They also wanted to bring in someone who was a bit more entrepreneurial, who had a record of building and restarting businesses.
What is your history in terms of entrepreneurship?
I started out in the aerospace industry and then I went into the software industry in the early days of TCP/IP networking. Then I started my own company called Aventail, which was the first SSL VPN company. Aventail raised a lot of money but then the bubble burst and I had to rebuild the company. The [iPass] board saw that.
You said you joined iPass as the economy collapsed. Did you think, ‘Oh no, here we go again!’?
I knew what was happening coming in. We were able to fairly well predict the decline of business travel, which crushed our business. We recognised there would be a right-sizing issue as well because companies would have commits that were higher than their usage.
Pretty quickly we did some aggressive restructuring in headcount and resources. We shrunk our footprint and got very focused on the technology side. All our product development at the time was in Bangalore, India. I made the decision to reduce that dramatically and we built a team in California. We started doing agile development and got very serious about re-building the product platform almost from scratch and changing the focus of the product itself; increasingly to take advantage of the consumerisation of IT.
Why shift development back to the US?
At the time around 60% of our business was being done in the US and I have a firm belief that if you are going to be good developers and product managers you have to be iterating in short cycles and agile development technology depends on that. I felt I couldn’t do that from Bangalore. There wasn’t a big domestic market of customers there and the infrastructure in place there wasn’t equivalent to the US.
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How did you reshape the company to cope with the collapsing economy?
One of the things I knew we needed to do was monetise the software and the technology. Before we would give it away for free and hope that people would connect on the network and we’d get paid for it. We’re starting to see q/q growth on revenue that is software related.
One of the things I would have expected coming into the job is that Wi-Fi would become less relevant with the likes of 3G, 4G and LTE handling a lot more. But it’s very clear now that carriers can’t do it all in the sky; you can’t generate all your internet activity from cellular networks. So suddenly Wi-Fi around the world is experiencing a renaissance. It’s exciting because we’re in the middle of it. It’s something our technology and platform has helped us have a role in but it’s not something I’d have bet on.
We had the technology side which was subscriber management, connectivity software for smartphones and so on but what I knew was valuable was the authentication fabric. Some iPass founders came from Visa and the idea behind it was to build a Visa-like transaction system for people travelling and using dial-up. That was then applied to Wi-Fi.
Your recent big announcement seems to follow on from that – the idea of a Wi-Fi exchange for service providers so they can offer worldwide Wi-Fi services.
Yes, and what were doing is not just sell them our aggregated networking, we’re trying to sell them the clearing and billing side. So if a service provider wanted to offer worldwide Wi-Fi to a subscriber they could pick the countries they want and negotiate their own deal. We just handle the authentication. It’s a very different kind of play, much more technology-oriented rather than network-oriented.
You mentioned the consumerisation of IT earlier. How is that affecting your business, with more people using tablets and smartphones?
The average worker can now have three devices – smartphone, tablet and laptop. A device doesn’t go away, you just add to them. Between checking this and that, people are now connected all the time, for better or worse.
What’s changing everything is not how they get procured – that’s pretty obvious, people go to the store and buy them – but how applications get deployed. IT doesn’t do that anymore, really. They are getting deployed from an app store.
It’s great for us, but hard at the same time. IT is our customer. We have to struggle with that too, we have to activate them and there has to be a billing relationship. There are challenges.
