Tyrone Pike, President and CEO of Cemaphore, talks with Brad Baldwin about defining the right mix of enterprise-class features for small and medium businesses.

The following interview is a transcription of a vidcast published on RockyMountainVoices in December 2007.

Brad Baldwin: This is Brad Baldwin with Rocky Mountain Voices and I'm here with Tyrone Pike, CEO of Cemaphore Systems. I know little bit about you but I'd like to know a little more. You are one of those serial entrepreneurs that has been around a lot of different companies. How can you describe yourself and what you've done in a few sentences?

Tyrone Pike: Well, I'm one of those serial entrepreneurs that really loves the technology world. I've run companies that have been based in New York, Utah, California, and the current one we’re working on is Cemaphore. It has a history of being connected with other great people that we've worked with here in the Utah Valley. Cemaphore is headquartered in San Mateo, and our development center is in Provo, and I go back and forth between the two places. We’ve built companies that we sold to Intel, and it's been an exciting run of six or seven different venture-backed startups.

Brad Baldwin: Now, Cemaphore is a venture-backed startup, is it not?

Tyrone Pike: It is. It's actually backed by three big backers: Mayfield Fund, Worldview, and V-Spring, which is located up in Salt Lake.

Brad Baldwin: Tell me a little bit about Cemaphore. What is that you do and what is your claim to fame?

Tyrone Pike: Our claim to fame is that we deal with the question of e-mail continuity and content management. We've found that e-mail is really, really critical in the way organizations run their lives. When we started the company five years ago, it was a pretty important part of people's lives and it has only grown in importance. So most of the people that we serve run their businesses around the content that is delivered through e-mail. That may be through Outlook, or Blackberries, and if those things aren't running all the time business is not being transacted. Once you understand that notion, you need to figure out how you build a system that is highly sustainable--so continuous operations of mail through all the various devices that you might actually be accessing that mail. So that's kind of the high order of what we do.

We also look at the question of mail content over time. How you can think about that content and make it an asset that you keep for the whole life of that particular information. It may be required to store for seven or eight years, if there's litigation involved then it may go out to 15 years. That's a bigger deal than to storing it in your mailbox. We look at the content and the content management of that data and we look at the ability availability of data services. We have two distinct offerings: one called MailShadow that provides shadow mailboxes in continuous operation of mail and we have a content management product called GeoShadow.

Brad Baldwin: What kind of platforms or systems does it support?

Tyrone Pike: It really focuses strictly on Microsoft Exchange. We work with Exchange 2000, 2003, in 2007. When you find out the market and see how it is moving there are a range of different offerings that were available 5-7 years ago that were popular that have become less popular. Exchange has taken market share. If one takes a hard look at that, there are somewhere around 200 million Exchange mailboxes in production today. They need to be protected and they need to be able to be accessed in real time, 24 seven.

These are production-quality enterprises that are using this. They may be small businesses and they go up to hundreds of thousands of users.

Brad Baldwin: You talk about continuity and content management. Those are two interesting things to talk about. Continuity is obviously really critical, if you don't have your e-mail it's like not having a phone in sales.  It’s a day off. So how do you work in that space?

Tyrone Pike: We think of geo-diversity as our friend. We need to find a way to get the content in your mailbox and move it to a geo-diverse location. Something outside of the threats that are present where your current exchange's infrastructure is. So we need to move 300-1000 miles away and keep a parallel instance running on that side. So our product focuses on building highly available mailboxes. Other products that are built this way try to build highly available mail servers. We take the most critical users that you have and build shadow mailboxes for them.

Brad Baldwin: That gives you continuous deliverance of your mail. There's this other concept that you're talking about which is the content that exists in my mailbox.

Tyrone Pike: Yes, most mailboxes, exchange included, can't manage more than eight years. That's way more information than they can handle. If you have large organizations they have very restrictive policies on how much can be stored in a mailbox. So if companies don't have a formal archiving system they just use the auto-archiving system that's in Outlook. So suddenly there's this proliferation of what are called PST files, and those things become great liabilities for organizations. They are the smoking gun that is not in a formal system. What we have found is that it's really important to find ways to actually harvest all of those orphaned OST and PST files and bring them back under control. So that's what the GeoShadow product does.

The MailShadow product instead deals with the current working set of the information that's on your exchange server, make sure that it's replicated to another location, so you can handle an outage that may occur from a flood, scud, power, fire, or power grid failure. We've lost things over multiple states--not only power in the data centers but the entire wired infrastructure to those infrastructures. If you look at that, it's a style of problem that a lot of people would never think could occur. So they have this other data center within 90 miles of there, but what happens to that? Both data centers get taken out by that power outage. They didn't have a sufficient infrastructure to deal with that. So you need to think about moving it further apart to locations that are far apart. If you're in New York you need to move it out to Colorado or London, to deal with a diversity of threats.

Bandwidth is critical because you need to be able to move this content. We need to be conservative with the bandwidth use and with our products, we look at the transactions and move only the transactions that apply to the mailboxes that are in question. We do that very efficiently using about maybe 1/5 of the bandwidth that a block-level replication server system does.

Brad Baldwin: Who uses this? What size of organization is your target customer?

Tyrone Pike: When we first attacked this we thought it was going to be set on a precise vertical: legal, financial services, hedge funds. Those were clearly people that were very interested. But it turned out that any organization whose lifeblood was mail wanted our product. In the past they have been shut out and some organizations are smaller in scale. This product starts in 100 seats for $6000. And guess what? There are people at 100 seats that could not afford continuity. And now they can. It's a really critical offering. Our average customer is up in the couple thousand mailboxes. If one looks at that, it kind of serves as a solid middle market. The people in the past that were set up and able to afford continuity systems were only people at the top of the triangle. People that had SANs in place and could do SAN replication and had staff that could manage that infrastructure. We found that those people who did it really well on the SAN side set the spec for what people wanted. People want recovery point objectives and recovery time objectives of 10 minutes or less. It's very hard to do and that's what our product does. 10 minute RPO (recovery point objective) that's how much times it takes: 10 minutes for 1000 mailboxes to get back online. It is very fast.

Brad Baldwin: That's moving things very quickly.

Tyrone Pike: It means you're not skipping a beat, if your business is actually active. By the way, it's not just Outlook, it's also keeping Blackberries alive and running. That’s a large part of it. If I look at the market that we serve most of the people that we serve carried portable devices, Blackberry being the dominant one. They are looking for continuous availability. One of the things that we learned with this device is that there is never a time that is good to have it down. People are using it all the time. It becomes another feature of our products. People use our product for planned maintenance. In the middle of the day they can fail over users to the alternate site and keep their Blackberry services running.

Brad Baldwin: What about migration? Sounds like it might be good for migrating from one service or system to the next.

Tyrone Pike: Because we run at the MAPI –layer, which is a licensed protocol. We are, in fact, actually the first company that was licensed by Microsoft for the MAPI protocol. We are able to be agnostic about the target and source of that information. We can have a source of Exchange 2000 and have the target be the 2007. Or it can be from 2003-2007. Some people buy our products strictly for migration to move the content from running 2003 over to 2007. When they do that, they then have the ability to get that whole other system running, confirm that it's the way they want, and then they do a permanent failover. Then they may replace the other hardware that is the source.

In the case of going to 2007 because that require 64-bit hardware, the old hardware is relegated to doing some other service function and they put in new 2007 for what now becomes the DR site.

Brad Baldwin: What do you see coming down the road? It seems like you've obviously got a good story for business executives that can buy this, because they’re living off that Blackberry. And then you got the IT people, which are constantly under pressure to make sure that the business people are satisfied. What is happening in the market?

Tyrone Pike: As a whole, people are just becoming more and more sensitive to keeping their systems running all the time. If we look again at the big triangle of the marketplace, we know that the people that are at top of the triangle could afford the Cadillac systems from EMC, the Symmetrix with SRDF, that really beautiful SAN-replicated systems. We have been able to service that middle market. If you look under 100 mailboxes, there is a vacuum and there is not a lot in the way of offerings there. We have been looking at a lot of service providers that build and service solutions that can give you continuity down in that sub 100 market. But that's where we’re looking in the future to kind of rounding that out. If we look at the breadth of that triangle, that base is a large market segment. Over the next couple of years that's probably where we will be spending some time on.

Brad Baldwin: The spec is drawn up by the people who really know and those of us in the smaller organizations can take advantage of a lot of the heavy lifting and heavy thinking that they've are you put in there.

Tyrone Pike: They have set the standards. We now know that you can build something that can run all of the time. That spec has now been the gold standard and if you can achieve that for people in the middle market and in the small and medium business, that’s a great boon to their business. Suddenly the content that they have on their Blackberry is available 24 seven.

So go to www.cemaphore.com and you can get whitepapers, content, evaluation software, and information on how to get yourself up and running.