Monday, August 1, 2011

Brainloop tapped by Twitter for secure collaboration

By Rodney H. Brown

Brainloop AG, a German secure collaboration software firm with U.S. operations in Cambridge, has landed a deal with Twitter to help make the social networking giant’s internal collaboration system more secure.

No financial details of the deal were announced, but Brainloop said that it provides its software primarily online under a software-as-a-service model, and that companies like Nokia, BMW and Deutsche Telekom use it to handle document security, particularly when those documents have to be shared with someone outside the enterprise. Paul Hands, vice president, Americas, for Brainloop, said that its product is not unlike a locked-down version of Microsoft Corp.’s Sharepoint collaboration tool.

“We are very much like Sharepoint except we put a firewall around the perimeter of that document as it leaves the organization itself,” Hands said. “Sharepoint is very good for collaboration inside the organization but it really falls down if you try to extend the reach of that document outside the organization.”

Those organizations are mostly in the 2,000-plus employee range, Hands said. In the four years Brainloop has had a presence in Cambridge to handle the Americas, the local office has grown to 12 staffers, and Hands said he would be hiring “three or four” more soon.

Brainloop, though privately held, has only taken one round of institutional funding, €2 million in July of 2007 from Baytech Venture Capital.  According to Hands, Brainloop has been profitable for the past five years, and all of its expansion so far has been funded by that profit, which has been driven by annual growth rates of 30 percent to 40 percent. The secure collaboration tool can be bought on an ongoing monthly subscription basis, or in a few months’ chunk for projects like due diligence work.

“We do offer an on-premise model which is really old school I know,” Hands said. “The vast majority of our revenue – probably 95 percent – comes from software as a service.”

While the largest vertical market for Brainloop is financial services, Hands said, any company that is beginning to prep for going public is also a potential customer. “Twitter is an example of one of those pre-IPO companies that is very cautious about their information getting out into the public,” he said.