I came across Passwork today and was really impressed with the presentation as well as focus of the product. This is the kind of product that I would instinctively sign up for and test drive… but for an unrelated reason I started poking around on their site to find out more about the company.
It became clear that the company is Russian and this fact alone represents a major impediment for any company in the security software space. In all fairness I am making this assumption off factors like domains and language… the company itself provided no contact information on their website, which is itself kind of weird.
There is obviously a lot of good tech that comes out of Russia but their is an intractable problem when going global and that is the ambiguity about the extent to which Russian government activities encroach on the activities of commercial companies. The same can be said of China and in the interest of being fully objective about this topic, the same can be said of the U.S.A. as more attention and disclosure was put on NSA, FBI, and other government agencies. Selling globally I know this is the case, companies not based in the U.S. have significant objections about domiciling data in U.S. datacenters.
The problem for companies in Russia (and China) is that of the perception of egregious bad actors, including overt criminal activity. It’s one thing to have the government accessing your data, it’s another altogether to believe you would be exposed to criminal industrial espionage. I simply would not try to build a security software company in Russia if I have an aspiration of selling to a global enterprise market. Kaspersky Lab is a notable exception here when it comes to endpoint security but it’s clear that the company is aware of this and also the rising tensions between the U.S. and Russian governments.
Passwork is also, apparently, aware of the obstacles and goes to lengths on their website to highlight open algorithms, data security and privacy. In addition to addressing these issues up front, they also offer a version of the software that is on-premise. I’m not sure any of these measures really overcome the perception of risk, which in many ways is a binary condition.
As much as I liked the marketing for Passwork, I didn’t sign up.
Related articles
(Cross-posted @ Venture Chronicles)
The Challenge of Being a Russian Security Software Company is copyrighted by Jeff Nolan. If you are reading this outside your feed reader or email, you are likely witnessing illegal content theft.
Enterprise Irregulars is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.
