CEO and President (Cohesity, parent of former Veritas data protection business), Veritas Technologies LLC (data protection business now part of Cohesity)
This is Resiliency Universe, a podcast about leadership, resilience, and transformation at the intersection of AI and data security. Hosted by Cohesity CEO and President Sanjay Poonen.
Hello everyone. I'm excited today to be talking to Mickey Bresman. Welcome. Thank you. I've gotten to know Mickey, CEO and founder of Semperis, and look at this, we've got black shirts. I mean, maybe it's Mickey Poonen and Sanjay Bresman. Semperis and Cohesity. Mickey, why don't you tell us a little bit first about Semperis, how the company got started, and what was your vision for what's now being called identity resilience?
Yeah. So, it's been about a decade now. And the starting of the company had to do, as you can imagine, with what happens when you don't have identity resilience. Our story basically started with a previous company that I had, the professional services one. We were brought in to assist several different companies when they had a worst day ever—basically, their identity going down. And we saw time and time again what it actually takes when you try to bring back the identity systems. And that's basically what prompted us to say, there has to be a better way. So, imagine the following situation. We were brought in to a telco company, they went down, nothing works. It's us and Microsoft together, and we're trying to bring them back up. We eventually find out it was a malicious activity, somebody actually took them down. But in order for us to understand what to do and how to bring them back. At the time, this is more than 10 years ago, it was a very new type of a thing to deal with. And then we see a financial institution that going through something similar. That basically prompted the idea that we have to find a way to make it better. Fast forward to where we are now, over a thousand customers.
Amazing. 25% of the 100 biggest US companies are using Semperis as their identity resilience platform. And we're growing over 70% year over year. And about 500 employees, roughly the company actually getting closer to 600 now. Wonderful. And listen, one of the things I understand, correct me if I'm wrong here, Mickey, when this infrastructure goes on Active Directory and related areas of Microsoft, Microsoft has a manual. That's like what, like 500 pages? It's a very complex manual.
It's not 500, but it's about 40 steps that you need to do per every DC in the environment. So, the manual process, I tried to do it. That's actually how we concluded that it's not going to be sufficient. One of the customers that we tried to do it manually for took more than 5 days.
