EP 283: Adeya: Swiss, Simple Secure Collaboration

Hey everyone its Alan Shimel for DevOps dot com. You're listening to another DevOps chat. We've got a new company to introduce to you on today's DevOps chat.

And in the name of the company is Adeya. I hope I didn't mispronounce that. But my guest will will give us the proper pronunciation.

I'd like to introduce you to Francois Rodriguez. He's the chief growth officer at Adeya. Francois, welcome.

Thank you for hosting us. Thank you. So Francois did I get the name right?

Yeah, correct. The pronunciation is correct. Americans still tend to say idea.

But is that the case? Correct. OK, well.

OK, well, you know, I always thought I had a little bit of a French accent. No, but I'm glad I got it right that. So Let's start with the obvious Francois, where our our audience may not be familiar with Adeya.

Why don't you, if you don't mind, give us a little background. Yeah, the background of the company is the following. So it is a spinoff from Year AFL EPF that is one of the top five universities in technology in the world.

Based in and so on next door. So for those that don't know where Rossini's is next door to Geneva and from that spin off, the the ask for was for encrypting voice communication for the Swiss Army at that time using Symbian operating systems that at that time nuclear was the leading mobile phone operating system. And that was the day the foundation of the company with the advent of the smartphone say.

The application has been in breach with that, with messaging, and then the mobile application become as well, a desktop application, tablet application evening as well. File sharing, instant messaging and we introducing as well video conference calling end to end encrypted. So that's the most important element of the of the suite is the encryption layer initially deployed in the blood for the Swiss Army.

So we are using the highest grade of encryption, so-called military grade, and we are bringing that technology to companies and in small organization as well. Excellent. So the Swiss army is already a customer.

Is that correct? Is the historical customer? OK.

And then at this point is the company. Venture capital is itself funded. What is the situation?

Yes, a venture capital which is important in in this type of business. You certainly have heard the news of crypto, I guess, that was having some links with the governments. So these days it's been pointed when you provide this type of technology that you don't ever strings with any organization, state, own or having any backdoor.

Sure, sure. I mean, everyone's worried about that. And you know as well, before we jump more into that.

Francois, what about your personal background, your journey? How did you come to be chief revenue? For certain.

Excuse me, chief growth officer. So I started my career in telecom at that time. I was in charge of developing the meta media content for a day, the youth and in student populations.

Before the advent of the smartphones, multimedia was a games ringtones. I don't know if you remember these days. Sure we do.

And then we developed the music content. The early days of empty trees and moving forward year professionalize my expertise in the media, transforming application into more professional applications. With the arrival of the tablets, we develop more and more professional applications for enterprise.

And then I join a brand new spin off from APAs and Seeta to bring connectivity on airplanes. The company you used to call on air. You've got Gogo in the US.

So he's a similar company providing connectivity to passenger multimedia and content to passenger, but as well, professional application for the cabin crew, electronic flight bags for the for the pilots. And more recently, I duty's connecting landing gear, engines and any data that the plane was generating. Sure.

I don't think on a day in 2000, 16. So how long has it day had been been around for, I didn't realize would when was a day founded? 2007.

Oh, really, so it's been. This is not some fly by night started yesterday. Company, right.

Right. So. Yeah.

The brand awareness is really recent because the typical client of FDA used to be governments that are quite shy to do any marketing runs and is really when I joined the company that we started the blocking and enterprise product. You know, in some ways, this reminds me of. So I'm a little older than you.

You know, back when we had the AOL message rooms or chat rooms were never done, anything that called the meeting rooms, maybe even before then. It was a it was a rather innocent time in the Internet where people didn't realize you can't let your children go online and just go into some chat room with people you know, know, and work can go on there. And then, of course, we saw horror stories of what people were writing in chat rooms, being made public or used the wrong way, or of predators preying on women and children and stuff in this because, well, it's the reason why we can't have nice things right.

Everything is always bad. People trying to take advantage of things. And then as a result of that.

You know, we sorry, a locking down, if you will, somewhat of a lot of that kind of technology. But then. I guess it's just human nature.

People want to communicate, right? People want to communicate, even God knows now what we're all locked in our houses. Right.

People's war is still communicate. Being alone and isolated is just kind of far into the human condition. Yeah, you're right.

So I used to put an application on my door to phone to lock the door for an hour. These days we up to three hours because, you know, they need to communicate. They don't go to school anymore.

So they need to be connected to friends. They need to chat. They need you to send pictures to send videos to you to do video calling.

These days, video calling is very important for for the youngsters. I'm usually not a very big fan of video calling, but they are Silwad those, you know, here, Naito, they're native to the Schrade, trust me, like I related. O.

this morning talking about we we both have children who were in high school, college now and in university. Yes. You know, they're they're not native people who the idea of doing video calling, the idea of listening to podcast and and so forth.

This is how they're used to consuming. Right. And they used to have the technology.

They used to the technology. And they were so very tech savvy in terms of what features and functions those tools can bring. And they are very, very, I would say, picky on which tools they're going to use.

And we've seen that in certain companies that there is a kind of step back when they propose a traditional tools that are quite clunky, quite difficult to use space, Lou, that you need to put the VPN around and all these. Old fashioned traditional tools have been rejected by the young population of workers. And more so now with these days of remote workers where you have, you know, a layer of bring your own device on top of it, where people are installing their own favorite applications to is very difficult to control, is very difficult to put security around when you don't have a clear policy on what is a load, what is not allowed.

And more so when you don't bring options. People are starting to download, you know, their favorite tools online. Obviously, the security is not their top priority is to make their work easy and fast and provide agility to the organization.

So that's a that that's a real issue. I agree. And, you know, this is a classic security conundrum, which is if we just think we're going to lay down on the tracks and say stop the train runs or so over.

Right. We can't we you can't stop that. So what we need to do is instead of being the people who say, no, we need to be the people say, yes, you can.

But here's a secure way of doing it. That maybe is it too cumbersome, too expensive, and still allows them to do what they need and want to do from a communications perspective. And again, it's really that's what the holy day thing is about, right, is.

Hey, you want a video? We'll do voice calls or, you know, messaging. You could still do that.

We understand it's important. But here's a way of doing it in a more secure fashion. Yes.

Security is important. But what we've been putting out, the heard of the development is the user experience because there is a lot of tools in the security space in the market. But, very few of them are really providing a seamless experience for the users and more so when they're not high tech people, because 80 people will always tell you of it.

That's very easy. You go in settings, you configure that and you put the VPN around and it's working. And in fact, nobody knows how to do it.

So what we've been doing is, is to to bring in one unique application and coding the idea like a Swiss Army knife in one tool. You have got different features. You don't need to have, you know, upbringing.

You don't need to have configuration. The security layers are once you install it in in your device and you start triggering the feature that you want to use. Absolutely.

In France, where if you could share with thyroid, it's. You know, how easy and how much does it cost? If you want to use the data, so let's say, look, I I'm I'm a little worried about our use of slack and or zoom for corporate communications.

You want to use what you want to use your kids or whatever is one thing. What would you know what what does it take to stand the day? So we've got four packages, depending on the on the security layer that you want to activate till they're the starting price, point is up for dollar, for dollar is the radius.

You know, they started package that provide you one to one video calls security the voice of IP, instant messaging and as well, you know, all day the Dropbox and lockbox where you can store some documents if you want to, had the video conferencing with multiple users, you have an extra option. And if you want to install everything on premise on your own datacenter. And this is what we do for governments.

There is an extra cost to deploy the system. But it is your entire system. You have no back doors, no cloud acts joujou to open up your data center, to work to to foreigners.

And you have everything in in your house. So that's that's the model that we do. So we starting with vey easy to set up a cloud.

Sudarshan based in Switzerland, and we use the strength of the cloud infrastructure in Switzerland with the data sovereignty. And we go, obce, deploy your own system on Prem. Ok.

So so there's sort of a cloud based system, if you will, sites or cloud based and then your betrixaban, Prem, because I know in many government situations, as you mentioned, they don't want to share public infrastructure. Right. And so that that's a real requirement.

So that's why I got to ask you. I mean, it seems like the obvious system would find a very fertile ground in today's environment with what's going on with coded with people working from home and everything else. How how is this affected or how is Avaya responding?

What would you seeing in the market? You're recently now just in the last couple of weeks as a result of the pandemic. So what we see is a very key of demand coming from the historical clients, which are government administrations that are really you expanding that the fleet is not, you know, just to secure a certain special project, but it's really to provide a we want the tool to work from home and in in in the most important security layers, because as soon as you leave the government institutions, you need to be connected from home with high level security, because then you bring the information outside the typical firewalls.

And this isn't what the governments are fearing. Now, the diversity that we're seeing is that we we we started adding hello. No, it took a over meaning coming out.

OK. Understanding what what we see is that Enterprise is now coming to equipping their entire organization and not just the top executives that used to travel a lot of good to countries where they need to shield their communication, but does want to protect their messaging to protect the documents that they are sending, avoiding sending them over e-mail. Because even though e-mail has been encrypted for several years, it's very difficult to have the pictures into working because the system are not inter working together depending on the operator that you use.

If one side is using Gmail, the other side is using Microsoft. You don't have to working with encryption, for instance. Sure.

So this is the way to try to ease the expense with this type of situation. What we see now is the remote workers as well. The employee themself are contacting us, too.

Hey, I heard that your sedition. T. people.

Well, that that's the way it always comes in. It's always that open source mentality, but very connected. So that's the NORAD, as I mentioned to you.

And we when we started. The time goes really quick here. I apologize, but we're way past 50 minutes.

I want to thank you for introducing a day to our audience. I wish you well in these uncertain times, both personally and with the company. And as I mentioned to you, I thought maybe we could do a video interview for our tech TV.

Yes, sure. Have you join us? Maybe we even could use a day or two.

We could record the video through. There is something. Sure.

You can put in action. Ok. Yes.

Perfect. Looking forward to that. All right.

Thank you, Chief. Chief growth officer for a day or Francois Rodriguez. Here are DevOps chat.

This is Alan Shimel. And you just listened to another DevOps chat.