Ensure Technologies

Ensure will build, buy, or partner to expand its markets in the next twelve months and beyond.

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Filed under: Dennis Blanchette | Ensure Technologies | Finding Gaps | IT Security | Managing Growth | Twelve Month Goals | Ypsilanti, MI

In this three minute segment (download iPod compatible, 14MB), Dennis Blanchette describes Ensure Technologies' goals for the next twelve months as well as its longer term strategy. In the next twelve months, Dennis wants to continue growing his partner programs to the point that they account for 60% of sales. He also expects to expand sales within the current 90% medical customer base to patient and asset tracking. Next, he would like to expand to additional heavily regulated industries like financial services, the legal profession, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

Further out, Dennis foresees Ensure providing an RFID infrastructure that can be used across a variety of industries. Ensure will build, partner, or buy to enter those markets.

Enterprise sales involve multiple stakeholders. Dennis Blanchette describes the needs of each of stakeholder and how Ensure seeks to satisfy them.

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Filed under: Dennis Blanchette | Ensure Technologies | Enterprise Software | Finding Gaps | IT Security | Ypsilanti, MI

In this 5 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 25MB) describes the typical enterprise sales process. Need for his product is typically driven by regulations and requirements such as HIPAA regulations to protect patient data, Sarbanes-Oxley to ensure internal control of financial data, or the need to protect intellectual property. However, while respecting the security requirements, employees must also be able to use the system.

Therefore, Dennis views his sale as comprising three entities:

• The CFO or CTO in charge of regulatory compliance.
• IT which is typically charged with implementing any solution and must satisfy the needs for regulatory compliance while also taking into account the needs of the end user.
• The end user who must experience the system.

Ensure's point of contact is typically IT or above. However, they must satisfy the end-user or the sale will not work.

Dennis discusses four challenges of succeeding at enterprise scale, how he has overcome them in the past, and how he expects to continue to overcome them at Ensure.

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Filed under: Dennis Blanchette | Ensure Technologies | Finding Gaps | IT Security | Ypsilanti, MI

In this 11 minute segment (download iPod compatible, 56MB), Dennis Blanchette describes what it is like to grow an IT company so that it is able to succeed at enterprise scale. He compares his current company, Ensure Technologies, with another where he was at the helm, Wise Solutions. As Dennis has mentioned in a previous segment regarding Ensure, he also learned from his customers at Wise. Specifically, customers were using Wise's single user technology to help manage their enterprise. With properly focused development, Dennis was able to move customers from this $300 product to an enterprise product that cost $10,000 and worked at a much larger scale.

Dennis perceives similar opportunities for Ensure, but cracking the enterprise market is hard. There are four challenges:

• Scaling your own processes: Generally, larger scale leads to more manufacturing efficiencies. However, internal processes generally have to be reworked to handle the higher volumes, and the supply chain must also be optimized.
• Handling customer workflow: Does your product add an efficiency to the customer or a roadblock? In the case of Ensure's 'Xyloc product, an efficiency is added by removing the need to manually secure computers.
• Scaling deployment: Enterprise customers may require an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude the level of deployment required for single user customers or very small businesses.
• Regulatory compliance: Many large corporations live in a thicket of regulations. Your product must be in compliance with those regulations.

Dennis Blanchette describes how Ensure Technologies evolved from primarily research to aggressively pursuing opportunities to commercialize its software. His focus is on figuring out how the buyer buys security products and then finding the right partners for Ensure to achieve higher sales.

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Filed under: Dennis Blanchette | Ensure Technologies | Finding Gaps | IT Security | Ypsilanti, MI

In this six minute segment (download iPod compatible, 32MB), Dennis Blanchette outlines Ensure's 10 year history to date. Ensure spent the first few years working out the kinks in its RFID technology and determining potential markets. It then rolled out to beta customers. For the past 3 to 4 years, the company has been focused on commercializing its products.

One area that Dennis is trying to emphasize is enterprise sales. They are willing to spend more money and purchase at much larger volumes. Some important points:

• Penetrating the enterprise frequently requires partnerships with other vendors, so that Ensure is part of a complete solution. Enterprise buyers buy complete solutions, not just components.
• Partnerships now account for 40% of Ensure's business, and Dennis expects to see that number move to 60% over the next couple of years.
• Ensure now has around 500 customers with thousands of users. One Enterprise customer alone could add 50,000 users to that total and increase revenue substantially, a not too different experience from that described by Dave Henderson at Autowatch.