Name: Dan Amiga | Island
Uploaded: 2023-04-27T20:30:00.000Z
Duration: 16 min 31 s

More from RSA Conference 2023

Dan Amiga

Co-Founder & CTO

Island

Info

Dan Amiga | Island

Dan Amiga

Co-Founder & CTO Island

>> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of RSA Conference 2023, day four. I'm your host, John Furrier. Dave Vellante left the building, he's flying back to Boston and we're going to wrap things up. Last couple interviews, get all the stories. We're going to go to the very end. Got a great story here with Dan Amiga, who's the Co-Founder and CTO of Island. The Enterprise browser is their product. It's a very compelling story. It thinks things differently, but provides an amazing simple interface that we all know, the browser. Dan, thanks for joining us.

>> My pleasure, thank you for inviting me.

>> John: Right, so we were just talking, we can't stop talking about this, so now the cameras are on. Let's get into it. The Island, a company that you founded and you've done multiple startups, it's called the Enterprise browser, what is it? Why did you build it?

>> Dan: Sure. So I founded the company with Mike Fey. Mike used to run Symantec and the CTO of McAfee in the past, and we got to know each other when he acquired my company in 2017. And we thought about... we always thought about enterprise browsers as in, you know, the browser today is the main tool. It is the operating system. And I like to ask people, if you have to choose between your operating system with no browser or a browser, what would you go for, right? And we just figured out how the opportunity is huge if you build a browser, that looks and behaves exactly like Chrome or Edge, et cetera, but has all of the enterprise and IT and even productivity controls and tools for the Enterprise, right? And it turns out you can do it if you are basing it on Chromium, the open source project behind all the modern browsers. We started two-and-a-half years ago. You know, amazing traction, hundreds of customers, pretty much every vertical, financial, healthcare, industrial, retail. But also, since we're based in San Francisco also, one of the things that excites me most is the tech adoption. So we have lots of big tech companies, no perimeter, only identity, using the Enterprise browser, over a million endpoints today.

>> John: Yeah.I mean it reminds me of the Brave browser when that came out, it was like, hey, that makes a lot of sense. It has everything built in for the consumer, you know, no malware, it's got some shielding for cookies but it wasn't really an Enterprise-grade browser. You're saying you did a similar approach, built the browser from scratch using the open source Chromium.

>> Dan: Yeah, I remember a few years ago, you used to see Brave everywhere. It's a great product, it's a living proof that there is room for purpose-built browsers.

>> John: Yes.

>> So Brave is a privacy-built browser, right? What we've done is we've built a browser that's built-in for the Enterprise, has a lot of privacy controls as well, and what we've seen is... and we like to call it Enterprise and not a secure browser. It has a lot of security controls, like an anti mal...

>> John: Different companies may have different needs.

>> Correct.

>> The Workflow is behind it, a lot of Legacy apps.

>> Dan: So we do invest a lot in Legacy and Workflow, privacy, security. But yeah, purpose-built browser for the Enterprise is a great...

>> John: Well I think it's an interface. I mean, like, I'd love to have a Cube browser for all of our users, media browser. But it's an interface, this is kind of the clever thing. So I can think of five reasons why I like it already. One, if you think about the workflows of old IT, I mean this show here is transforming from old security to new security. You're hearing about platforms. Platforms are inherently a great thing. But a browser's a front-end to probably back-end cloud. Sure, I'll get more questions on how your back-end works, but you know, as a user, I go to work, I'm a big financial services company, I'm sure they've got some certified apps, Bloomberg subscription, they've got databases, they've got VDI or some sort of virtual desk, they don't have everything blocked down.

>> So I'll tell you about what what I consider to be new security.

>> John: Yeah, go ahead.

>> New security. >> John: Go ahead.

>> So let's go back 10 years ago, all right? And you see a lot of the vendors today who've built tools for 10 years ago and those tools are about shackling the user. They don't care about making the connection slower, the experience bumpy, et cetera. They don't care about blah. So, new security for me, is about faster work, easier to work with, right? And that's what the Enterprise browser is all about. When you build those tools directly, and I'll tell you what the aha moment we've been talking about your nephew earlier, right?

>> John: Yeah. >> And how he complains working at a financial and how things are slow, right? That's the aha moment. When you use the browser, things are faster, you can actually remove a lot of the intermediates and the speed bumps. And you talked about theCUBE browser for you guys.

>> John: Yeah.

>> So what we do is we also have what we call Enterprise branding. So it doesn't have to be the Island browser, it can be the browser for the financial, the browser for the medical healthcare. And it makes the experience so much better for the frontline workers.

>> John: Let let me ask you a question. I mean, the first thing a skeptic would say is, "Okay, what about compatibility? Some things don't work well with browsers." I've even seen Safari doesn't work well on some apps. What's the... what's the position on compatibility?

>> Dan: Yeah, the world is pretty much standardized on Chromium as the defacto platform. So we, you know, we support anything that works in Chrome or Edge, et cetera, which is a hundred percent of...

>> John: Is Edge Chromium based?

>> Yeah, Edge is Chromium based.

>> John: Okay, I did not know that.

>> Edge is Chromium based since like three years ago. And so that pretty much covers 100...99% of the Enterprise. There's Legacy as well. There's your old Activex, Internet Explorer, we support that as well. So we baked in...

>> John: That's got some security issues.

You've got to watch that. >> Dan: Yeah, yeah.

>> We all know that. >> Dan: Exactly.

>> So we baked in Legacy I stuff, IE stuff, and we do the controls for the Activex, the Flash, all of the stuff that was... It's a good example for consumer versus Enterprise. The consumer browsers took these out. We kept them only for your internal apps, for specific applications where you can put it on.

>> John: What about vulnerabilities? People would be like, "Okay, I get it, a browser." How do you ensure or give confidence that the security in the browser from an Activex or any kind of vulnerability that might be known or old or?

>> Oh my God. The... I like to call it the asymmetrical nature of the web. So think about a user goes to Salesforce. Salesforce has hundreds of security engineers, right? But once you log in, the cookie is at the end point. The security is now at the endpoint responsibility, right? So what we did is, you know, we built an entire security stack that protects all of the user data, the cookies, local storage. We have an anti-exploitation technology that takes all of these exploits away. We have anti-phishing technology, make sure users are not typing their credentials where they shouldn't have. We even have security awareness built into the product. We can teach users what links they should click and what links they couldn't, right?

>> John: Mm hm. How about browser on support from Mac

or PC? >> Oh we work across...

>> So biometrics all plays well into it, as well.

>> Biometrics is a big portion of what we do. We take, you know, we like to say we have a lot of password-less abilities with biometrics. So it works across all the operating systems, Mac and Windows, Linux, et cetera.

>> John: Yeah, take me through now, first of all, I love the product, love the vision, I love this purpose-built browser. I think that's a very clever and realistic vision. People want to have stuff customized. Back-end, is there cloud behind it? What's behind it? What's the architecture, or not? Is there toolbar market? Is there plugins? What's the extensibility? Take us through kind of the holistic architecture of your business.

>> Dan: Sure. So very simple, very simple architecture. We have a policy that's being downloaded from the cloud. So you go and configure your policy in the management console, but then the browsers would download the policy and would run it locally on the...

>> John: From your...from your cloud.

>> Correct, okay. But at the end of the day, it's an end-point application, it's a browser, the policy gets evaluated on the endpoint. Now, from an architectural perspective, the Chromium stack is very scalable. So you can build a lot of modules on top of that stack. So my team is growing up to be about 150 engineers and think about them as a separate companies. So we have a dedicated team working on DLP controls, a dedicated team working on productivity controls. From a customer perspective, they get all of these modules built in when they download the browser and use it, right? Super extensible organizations can add more functionality, can keep using a hundred percent of the extensions they use today.

>> John: Like the Chrome extension.

>> Like the Chrome extension.

>> John: And all the apps that are supported, no-one knows the difference. It's really on OS...Mac OS or Windows.

>> You literally cannot tell the difference.

>> Got it. So it's like Edge browser in a way.

>> Yeah.

>> It would feel like Chrome or Edge.

>> Dan: Correct.

>> But with all the controls that Enterprise want.

>> Dan: Yeah. And if you think about what we've been doing in the industry in the past 15 or 20 years, we put all of those controls outside of the browser, right? So now when you bake it inside, it makes so much sense. Also from an architectural perspective, we live pre-SSL, you don't have to terminate SSL, right? So the end user experience is just so much faster, so much better.

>> John: Talk about the browser as it goes beyond the desktop to say mobile. You've got web response, which I get that's probably going to be good, but what about native mobile apps?

>> Dan: Sure. >> And iPad apps, or over the set-top TV apps?

>> So we have built-in support for mobile and users can go ahead and download our mobile app for their Enterprise and use it, right? So that's a big thing for us. Lots of... a lot... a big requirement in the market. If you think about organizations, they need to enable BYOD, right? They don't want to manage these devices. Nobody wants to manage thousands and thousands of devices. And in the workforce, nobody wants to have his device managed, right? So we do have a browser-based distribution where we can launch these iPhone apps, we can connect directly to internal applications or SaaS applications, apply controls. But those devices don't have to be fully managed devices.

>> Ah, you're the... just, you're the doorway

to that Enterprise. >> Correct.

>> So you're looking at the Enterprise app there...

>> Correct.

>> ... as far as the phone's concerned.

>> Dan: As far as the phone's concerned.

>> Okay. So let's get into the customers. What's the traction that you have right now? Take us through some of the business side of it. What's it like? So, what's your reaction here on the floor? I saw the big booth, you've got a huge booth.

Congratulations. >> Dan: Thank you.

>> You must be swimming in some BC money, right? Customer money?

>> It's...

>> John: You're doing well? (John laughs)

>> It's...no complaint though. The company has raised more than $250 million. You know, it's our sixth or seventh rodeo, so we were lucky to partner with some of the best investors in the world, Sequoia and Insight and the likes. It is a huge opportunity. Now in terms of traction, this is a new category.

>> John: Yeah, I totally agree.

>> The customers don't have...

>> John: Custom-built browser front end tied into a backend cloud, totally get it.

>> Is it, is it? >> Yeah.

>> So, new category means there's no budget yet, right? New category means customers are skeptical, right? But guess...

>> John: You've got to educate them.

>> Exactly. But guess what happens when they see it? They're like, this changes so much, so much stuff. It's such a big opportunity for consolidation. So we've been about a year-and-a-quarter, so about five-quarters in the market.

>> John: Selling and delivering.

>> Selling and delivering. You know, Fortune-10 customers, Fortune-100 customers, across every vertical. So there's lots of adoption, hundreds of customers, customers I'm very excited about, some of the big names in the world. But also since we're based in San Francisco, some of the best tech companies in the world are adopting this.

>> John: And they're rolling it out across the company. So it's not like... are they rolling out like, because... as a field, are they taking pilot approach?

>> Dan: So you know, they're adopting it, so you don't have to do an Enterprise-wide enrollment on day one. So we have customers who've started with their BYOD or contract or use case, and then what we were seeing is we were seeing this great movement with, they start with one use case, and like any platform, right, they go, "Oh, it's so easy. Let's apply this to more controls." Right? By the way, they don't have to change the... they don't have to tell their users, "You guys should stop using Chrome or stop using Edge" right? There's a dual modality.

>> Yeah, yeah. They can have it. I mean, look, it's a bold... first of all, congratulations, bold move, love the strategy, love the aggressiveness. Category creation's a big...

>> Dan: Always fun.

>> Always fun. It's 'Go big or go home' right there. And it sounds like you're looking good off the tee, as they say, in the VC world. Now the question I would say is that, okay, if DevOps replaces... DevSecOps replaces IT, normally this kind of old way was run by IT departments. Now network and security teams are taking over that function and DevOps has taken over IT because developers are doing all the IT.

>> Dan: Yeah.

>> But classic IT, of getting someone their machine, getting all their apps, putting the servers together, that's all done in the cloud now. It's a little bit easier, I should say, but, well, some would argue with that. But, like, it's just different.

>> Dan: Absolutely, yeah.

>> It's not a department where people just manually labor, now it's gone away, you're now the platform. Who's running this right now for you? Is it the DevOps teams? Is it the security teams? It the network teams?

>> Dan: So it really depends on the company. We have customers where, you know, they spend about an hour a week, right, to set it up and it would be that one security guy, usually companies about up to 5,000 employees. And then we have big digitalization projects. We've been working with a big business in... it's going to change the way they access their apps. Hundreds of thousands of users, right? Then they have a bigger team, right? Usually the IT team or the desktop team would be running this, right?

>> John: Mm hm. Well, what's the next goal for you? What's the next step? Get the funding, you're in market, you're going to amp it up, raise the awareness, get some beach hair? What's the use case that gets you in the door, locks you in?

>> Well, it's actually not a security use case. I'd say one of our main use cases is the VDI reduction. And we call it the length of the wire. It's 2023, nobody wants to wait to get pixel streams from the cloud to go to Salesforce, right? So we see a lot of VDI reduction. Also, from a just pure dollars perspective, a VDI session would be thousands of dollars a year for an average company. We take it down quite a bit, right? So that's the main use case. What's in it for us going forward? We're going to keep pushing, the opportunity is huge.

>> John: You've got a lot of engineers, 150 engineers, that's a good number.

>> Yeah, yeah. We're growing that up. Again, the opportunity is a big opportunity.

>> And you said you got SF and then you got Tel Aviv, is that where the operations are?

>> We've got the...headquartered in...

We're headquartered in Texas. >> John: Texas, okay.

>> That's where Mike Fey, our CEO is and my business partner. And then we have engineering and product based in Tel Aviv.

>> John: Awesome. Congrats, well, the CUBE is in Tel Aviv this year.

>> Dan: Oh! We're happy to host you guys.

>> Yeah, we were going to be there in 2019, but the pandemic hit, we were making plans. There's so much demand for theCUBE in Tel Aviv. We're going to need you to give us a little endorsement when we get down there, but yeah, great stuff. Congratulations on the Island browser, Island Enterprise browser with Island, purpose-built, very bold, very visionary, very real. I think it's going to be the next big thing. The question's going to be, you got to get those engineers make sure all the binaries are there...

>> We've got to execute.

>> ... making sure the developers can right code to it, create an ecosystem for it, then I think you're golden.

>> Absolutely. We got to, we got to execute. As I always like to say, in 2023, the product has to be perfect, customers have to love it. But thank you for having me.

>> John: Congratulations. Great conversation with Dan Amiga, the CTO and Co-Founder of Island. They make the Enterprise browser, a revolutionary idea, a new category creation, which is... we know what that means. It's going to go big or go home, and we know, it's looking good right now. So Dan, thanks for coming along to theCUBE coverage. We're already going big here, day four, live coverage. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back with more wrapping up the show after this short break. (gentle mellow music)

Dan Amiga | Island

>> My pleasure, thank you for inviting me.

>> Dan: Yeah, I remember a few years ago, you used to see Brave everywhere. It's a great product, it's a living proof that there is room for purpose-built browsers.

>> John: Yes.

>> John: Different companies may have different needs.

>> Correct.

>> The Workflow is behind it, a lot of Legacy apps.

>> Dan: So we do invest a lot in Legacy and Workflow, privacy, security. But yeah, purpose-built browser for the Enterprise is a great...

>> So I'll tell you about what what I consider to be new security.

>> John: Yeah, go ahead.

>> New security. >> John: Go ahead.

>> John: Yeah.

>> Dan: Yeah, the world is pretty much standardized on Chromium as the defacto platform. So we, you know, we support anything that works in Chrome or Edge, et cetera, which is a hundred percent of...

>> John: Is Edge Chromium based?

>> Yeah, Edge is Chromium based.

>> John: Okay, I did not know that.

>> John: That's got some security issues.

You've got to watch that. >> Dan: Yeah, yeah.

>> We all know that. >> Dan: Exactly.

>> John: Mm hm. How about browser on support from Mac

or PC? >> Oh we work across...

>> So biometrics all plays well into it, as well.

>> John: From your...from your cloud.

>> John: Like the Chrome extension.

>> Like the Chrome extension.

>> John: And all the apps that are supported, no-one knows the difference. It's really on OS...Mac OS or Windows.

>> You literally cannot tell the difference.

>> Got it. So it's like Edge browser in a way.

>> Yeah.

>> It would feel like Chrome or Edge.

>> Dan: Correct.

>> But with all the controls that Enterprise want.

>> John: Talk about the browser as it goes beyond the desktop to say mobile. You've got web response, which I get that's probably going to be good, but what about native mobile apps?

>> Dan: Sure. >> And iPad apps, or over the set-top TV apps?

>> Ah, you're the... just, you're the doorway

to that Enterprise. >> Correct.

>> So you're looking at the Enterprise app there...

>> Correct.

>> ... as far as the phone's concerned.

>> Dan: As far as the phone's concerned.

Congratulations. >> Dan: Thank you.

>> You must be swimming in some BC money, right? Customer money?

>> It's...

>> John: You're doing well? (John laughs)

>> John: Yeah, I totally agree.

>> The customers don't have...

>> John: Custom-built browser front end tied into a backend cloud, totally get it.

>> Is it, is it? >> Yeah.

>> So, new category means there's no budget yet, right? New category means customers are skeptical, right? But guess...

>> John: You've got to educate them.

>> John: Selling and delivering.

>> John: And they're rolling it out across the company. So it's not like... are they rolling out like, because... as a field, are they taking pilot approach?

>> Yeah, yeah. They can have it. I mean, look, it's a bold... first of all, congratulations, bold move, love the strategy, love the aggressiveness. Category creation's a big...

>> Dan: Always fun.

>> Dan: Yeah.

>> Dan: Absolutely, yeah.

>> John: You've got a lot of engineers, 150 engineers, that's a good number.

>> Yeah, yeah. We're growing that up. Again, the opportunity is a big opportunity.

>> And you said you got SF and then you got Tel Aviv, is that where the operations are?

>> We've got the...headquartered in...

We're headquartered in Texas. >> John: Texas, okay.

>> That's where Mike Fey, our CEO is and my business partner. And then we have engineering and product based in Tel Aviv.

>> John: Awesome. Congrats, well, the CUBE is in Tel Aviv this year.

>> Dan: Oh! We're happy to host you guys.

>> We've got to execute.

>> ... making sure the developers can right code to it, create an ecosystem for it, then I think you're golden.

>> Absolutely. We got to, we got to execute. As I always like to say, in 2023, the product has to be perfect, customers have to love it. But thank you for having me.