StayPrivate CEO Andrew Brogden and Commercial Director Adrian Barnard (pictured) are bringing a proven enterprise security solution to the channel that promises to unlock significant recurring revenues.
Former Modern Communications MD Barnard has known Brogden for some time and is a key shareholder in the security business which counts among its enterprise customers Blackberry and Sequoia. “We have changed the commercial direction of the company,” stated Barnard. “StayPrivate has now developed a proven enterprise solution for the channel which represents a significant recurring revenue opportunity for partners.”
StayPrivate provides a global service which delivers enterprise military grade encryption and storage at a low cost for users. It has over 1,000 businesses globally using its platform across all sectors, but with a strong UK bias. “We have taken the enterprise product, commercialised it for the channel and built out enterprise level services and security for a consumer app,” added Barnard. “We had a product that was already recognised as easy to use in the market, and have now made it genuinely mass market and channel-ready.”
According to Barnard, the opportunity to develop products that scale and deliver a positive societal impact was too big to ignore. “The huge global awareness of privacy and the use of personal data by big tech at the expense of consumers presents a big opportunity to deliver real change and a socially useful product,” he said. “Building both the channel and consumer propositions while investing in product development was the key challenge. Now, customers are requesting a secure or white list/invitation only email service which is at the scoping stage.”
Brogden noted that Britain’s secure email and document storage requirements have in the past been bereft of adequate solutions, and that StayPrivate’s core proposal for protecting emails emerged during his time working in the finance sector where he developed an ambition to boost security levels.
“The City of London is a global powerhouse but its growth has been at the expense of developing the specific expertise that has been available to companies in Silicon Valley,” stated Brogden. “There is a significant unfilled need for private email and we have an opportunity to be one of the primary players in this emerging space, having refocused our efforts to create a mass market product that works seamlessly for everybody.”
Our aim is to provide everyone with their own private space where they can store, send, receive and share communications in private
StayPrivate began its commercial life selling direct to businesses, but its growth strategy took a new direction that reflected the improvements in its product, enabling it to bring new solutions to the channel. “We strongly believe that StayPrivate is best delivered as an addition to, or part of an existing partner offer,” added Brogden.
He worked in financial services for many years, primarily as a derivatives trader. Working in this fast moving environment relies on heavy mathematical modelling which meant he was a heavy user of IT and comms. “I had invested in several early stage IT businesses, including most notably Snapchat, but only moved into the sector itself in 2014 when, along with Rob Reid, a long-term colleague of mine, we saw the opportunity to create StayPrivate to fill the need for financial services companies to have a secure way of communicating with clients,” explained Brogden.
“We were working on a project for a large life insurance company. They needed a way to communicate efficiently and securely with potential clients, but email was not secure and private messaging did not provide a proper audit trail. Rob and I realised that we could combine our enterprise offering with our ideas for a consumer app to create a single platform that would work for both businesses and consumers. The need for secure email is well established, but solution providers have tended to focus on enterprises and the technology has lacked the simplicity and scalability required to work in the SME and consumer space. Our aim is to provide everyone with their own private space where they can store, send, receive and share communications in private.”
The company has been growing at over 100 per cent year-on-year, and as well as managing the effects of Covid-19 it has made preparations for another big impact. “Ahead of Brexit our EU clients wanted to have the assurance that their data would remain in the EU, so we needed to reconfigure our secure environment to work over multiple geographic locations,” commented Brogden. “We are now in a position to offer companies a range of choices for data storage – UK, EU or US.”
StayPrivate’s formula is welcome in a segment of the security market that is up for grabs. “The competition between pure IT MSPs and comms providers who’ve broadened their offer to include IT products such as private email is where it’s going to get interesting,” added Barnard. “We aim to open doors for resellers seeking to secure additional much valued recurring revenue opportunities.”