Today’s Q&A Wednesday is with Scott Bils, Founder and CEO of Conformity. The company recently announced their product, and some of the first SaaS companies that they will be interoperating with. You will definitely be hearing more about Conformity in the future.
Give us the elevator pitch for Conformity.
Conformity has created the first software-as-a-service (SaaS) user management solution to help organizations address the explosion of on-demand applications in their environment. As the growth of SaaS accelerates, especially among small and mid-sized organizations, managing users across each SaaS application deployed requires significant time and effort. With Conformity’s single on-demand solution, customers can now reduce the cost and risk associated with ineffective tracking and administration of SaaS access rights, usage and activity.
Tell us about the Conformity team.
We decided to launch Conformity last year, after recognizing from both a business and technical view that organizations were going to need a way to manage the oncoming ‘tidal wave’ of SaaS. The core Conformity team includes myself, Roy Kipp our CTO, and Rich Pusateri our SVP of Engineering. In addition, we’ve recently formed an initial advisory board, comprised of industry experts Jay Gardner, Kevin Cunningham and Marc Yagjian. Jay is a former senior executive and CIO at BMC, who also launched BMC’s On Demand business. Kevin and Marc are co-founders of pioneering companies in the identity and systems management spaces here in Austin (Waveset Technologies and Tivoli Systems respectively).
Who are your competitors?
Conformity’s biggest competition today comes from the manual, spreadsheet-based processes that small and mid-sized organizations use to manage and track SaaS applications, users and activity. Conformity doesn’t compete against the large identity and systems management vendors, as their focus is on managing on-premise apps and users for large enterprise customers.
How have you funded the company so far?
Conformity has been self-funded to date, but we are currently in the process of raising our first round of outside capital.
You are tapping into a huge area of need. What will be the biggest hurdles you will face as a company?
Conformity’s biggest and most exciting challenge is going to be staying ahead of our customers who are aggressively looking to adopt SaaS as broadly as possible across their organizations, and have been eagerly awaiting a solution like Conformity’s to help them manage their on-demand environments.
Uplogix announced that they’ve raised a $10M Series C financing. The company provides secure remote management solutions. Investors include Citi, Adams Capital Management, and other private investors. “We believe Uplogix has found its place in the emerging remote management space and has proven this belief by growing its revenues, customer base and global footprint,” said Martin Neath, General Partner at Adams Capital Management. “Uplogix is based on a strong foundation of knowing what remote management problems occur within enterprise IT environments, and delivering against those challenges. They are an innovative company that is poised to capitalize on a rapidly growing market, and we are excited to further invest in their efforts and opportunity.”