Tesserent Ltd (ASX:TNT) Managing Director, Keith Glennan, talks growth and opportunity in the cyber security and managed services.Carolyn Herbert: Hello I’m Carolyn Herbert from the Finance News Network and joining me from Tesserent Limited
(ASX:TNT) is Managing Director, Keith Glennan. Keith, welcome back.
Keith Glennan: Thanks Carolyn.
Carolyn Herbert: Can you start by giving us a brief introduction to the company and your products?
Keith Glennan: Tesserent is a managed securities services provider, which means we install, monitor, manage and update the key security infrastructure for our customers. So we protect their network, we make changes for them to enable them to do business, but make sure that they’re secure when we make those changes.
Carolyn Herbert: Cyber security breaches like what happened with the Australian Census website, often make headlines. So what is Tesserent’s approach to cyber security?
Keith Glennan: I guess we’re accustomed to reading the headlines about the big names and Census obviously. I think in the last 24 hours Adult Friend Finder, we’ve discovered 400 million names have been leaked there. So these are the things that make the press. The things that don’t make the press are the average business I guess, the normal business. People who are not household brand names, but they face the same kinds of risks that the large companies do. Just not on a scale that puts them on the front page of the newspaper.
Carolyn Herbert: Cyber security in the Cloud has become a competitive space. So how does Tesserent differentiate itself from the larger companies?
Keith Glennan: I guess firstly we’re a specialist; this is all that we do. So a lot of the larger companies that we compete with offer lots of different services, and security is just one of those things. We are 100 per cent focused on security. So we have a team of experts, we live and breath security 24 hours a day. We’re an Australian based company, which makes us a little bit different as well; we’re building our own technology here as well.
So I think that really differentiates us from a lot of the competitors in the market. Most of the competitors source a third party platform and try to layer a service on top of it. Whilst we partner with a lot of global companies, we also build our own technologies as well.
Carolyn Herbert: A more general question Keith. What is the size of the global cyber security market and what do you see as Tesserent’s opportunity set?
Keith Glennan: The global market is huge and growing. The analysts tell us that at the moment, the managed security space is about a $US15 billion a year business. We expect that to grow by 2019 to about $US27 billion. So it’s a massively growing market and obviously our opportunity is to continue to grow with that market, as well. When we listed the company earlier this year, we announced that our strategy was to continue organic growth, but also to grow by acquisition as well. So we’re certainly looking for opportunities.
This is a business that’s all about critical mass; it’s very difficult to do this on a small scale. You need to get critical mass to be effective. A lot of businesses in this space struggle to get beyond a certain level. So our challenge is really to grow the business through organic growth, acquisitions and partnerships, so we can achieve that critical mass and then really deliver effective outcomes for our customers.
Carolyn Herbert: Finally Keith, what’s your long-term ambition for Tesserent?
Keith Glennan: Certainly we want to be the preeminent managed security services provider in Australia, but many of our customers are outside of Australia. In fact, we have more customers running our technology outside of Australia, than inside Australia. So you know we’ve really focused on a few core sectors, education, government and corporate. We want to continue that, but we want to be able to do it on a much larger scale than we are at the moment, which will see us expanding our presence through Asia and through Europe, and then probably into the US as well.
Carolyn Herbert: Keith Glennan, thanks for the update.
Keith Glennan: Thanks Carolyn.
ENDS
