The truth is, I thought this interview would bore the crap out of me even if I had The background to understand everything, but I actually had fun!
Mickey, you're the founder and CEO of Semperis. What exactly led you to found the company and was your original vision close to the current one?
Thank you, Philip. In my previous position, I served as a CTO of a professional services company that is a Microsoft gold partner in the fields of infrastructure, office 365 and Azure. While doing a consultancy in the field of business continuity (BCP/DRP) with one of the biggest banks in Israel, we were working together with Microsoft senior field engineer (SPFE) on the recovery scenarios of the Active Directory. The results of the disaster recovery testing were troubling – we had come to understand that it would take the bank approximately 3 days to recover.
Now, you need to keep in mind that if the Active Directory is down it means that people can’t even login to their PC’s and the organization is completely shut down. This means complete chaos - no line of business applications, no mail, and no access to the mainframe. It quickly escalated and reached the CIO, he was pissed! We then approached Gartner to search for vendors that could help with the automation of the AD DR process. Long story short, the answer from Gartner lead us to understand that there is a huge hole in the AD DR area that requires a new approach. We needed a team so here are the guys we decided to work with, who later on became part of Semperis:
Guy, the senior Microsoft engineer and now CTO of Semperis. And Matan, an R&D leader that served in a top secret IDF computer unit, now our VP R&D. We tackled the identity platform recovery problem. Along the way, we discovered that the identity platform protection created many more challenges, especially with the IT world becoming hybrid. So while the core vision remained the same, we extended our solutions to provide recovery, governance and auditing both for the on-premises and cloud identity platforms.
How many emails do you have in your inbox right now? How do you deal with them?
I actually, trying to be more efficient, counted my unread emails, and I’ve got 92 unread messages, which is the average number of emails I get everyday. I usually try to go over each one and see if it requires an immediate response, or if it’s something that bottlenecks the team. If a short answer is all that is needed, I usually try to get to it right away. If it’s a long one, however, I have a filing system: immediate follow up, follow up by end of the week and then it’s label by subject (e.g. product related issues, conference related, partner related and so on). I can’t say that I get to all of them on time, but I always try my best.
How are Semperis' solutions different from other providers of Active Directory Management?
Eventually it all comes to innovation. The legacy solutions are a 10 year old approach of backup and recovery, yes nobody has really done anything about this for the past 10 years and what is worse is the amount of time it takes to actually do the recovery. Now imagine that you picked the wrong backup and you need to do it again, yes that happens.
With our solutions, we came up with a completely different approach – continuous tracking. We collect all the modifications as they happen in the environment and store them in a database. For our customers that means they have all the information and, even more valuable, they don’t need to spend all this precious time during a crisis mounting or extracting anything! They simply pick a point in time and we provide them with the information in a matter of seconds as opposed to hours!
When it comes to Active Directory disaster recovery, there is only one provider besides us that was able to create a disaster recovery automation for Active Directory. Here the innovation comes in a form of an intelligent system that decides, during the recovery process, how to execute in any given scenario and the administrator simply needs to approve or modify the steps based on its needs. The rest is done by the system.
How did the partnership with Microsoft start? What have been the biggest achievements for Semperis since then?
Semperis was very lucky to be accepted to the Microsoft accelerator more than 3 years ago. As most of us are ex-Microsoft employees, getting the recognition was a huge thing for us. The accelerator provided us with a tremendous push forward that is still going strong. It’s hard to say what were the biggest achievements since, but to mention a few: an investment round led by ex-Microsoft GM together with an ex-HP GM, customers being recognized by Microsoft to be chosen as one of the 15 most promising startups worldwide, signing partnerships with amazing companies around the globe, and much more.
How do you think your previous experience has helped to improve Semperis?
Having spent years on the customer’s side and later on the integrator side, I’ve gained a good perspective on how I think a vendor should operate. I have the ability to advocate for customers and empathize with their obstacles and challenges. My technical background provides me with the ability to understand the deep technical problems that we need to deal with.
What are the biggest obstacles you've faced so far?
It’s really hard to say. I always say that running a startup is like running a marathon, it’s never easy :)
Can you give us a glimpse into the next stage in Semperis' future? Obviously spoilers are welcome.
The next stages for Semperis are all about fulfilling our vision in the Identity protection field. The immediate future includes security features for hybrid environments, and the next release to provide our customers with the ability to align their identity platform activities with their organizational policy. In the long run we will expand our support for the cloud environments and provide a 360 protection for the organizational identity.
I would like to say thank you to Mickey for his time and actually answer my sometimes silly questions. He will be monitoring this post so if you have any questions for him feel free I’m make sure he answers them ;)
