Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[00:21]
Hi everybody, Joel Martin of HFS Research. I’m the executive research leader in charge of our applications modernization services research, and I dive a lot into things affecting that move from legacy to modernized apps. We’re also touching a lot on all the interplay and the dependencies and the need to incorporate AI. And something that comes up time and time again is security. So today, I’m joined by David Gomes, CEO of Eclypses. David is one of our Hot Tech vendors that we’ve recently covered. His company and his leadership are really rethinking the way companies need to deploy security in a scalable, robust, and fully compliant and future-ready manner. So thanks for joining us, David. Good to see you.
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[00:51]
Well, thanks, Joel. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and your viewers here, and wanted to thank you and the team at HFS for all the support and all the coverage you guys are giving us. So thank you.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[01:21]
So David, we’ve had a lot of conversations on this topic, and you and your team are very passionate about making security incredibly robust, but also manageable and deployable in a way that really reduces those attack vectors — also considering things like the future of APIs, quantum, and those things. So let’s start with just, for our audience, give me a background on who Eclypses is and what’s driving your investments and your interest in the security area.
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[01:38]
At Eclypses, we are a cybersecurity company. However, we’re a little bit different. We’re taking a much different approach when it comes to cybersecurity to really cut through the noise. Many of these cyber technologies that are out there today, their job is to keep the bad guys out. And in reality, with our technology, what we’re saying is, hey, we’re taking the approach that in most cases, those bad actors are already going to be in your network. And if they’re already there, how do we protect the data? And that’s where we come in. We don’t keep the bad guys out, but if they get in — or when they get in — and you’re using the Eclypses technology, they will get absolutely nothing of value, because our core focus is protecting the data.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[02:34]
How do you do that? I mean, what’s different? Because I know from working with Cisco and Palo Alto and Fortinet, in both this job and previous jobs, that’s what everybody’s talking about — protecting the data, protecting the networks. What’s different about Eclypses?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[02:49]
Well, in most cases, most organizations are relying on the network operator for security. They’re relying on the network infrastructure to protect their data itself. They’re relying on TLS. And in reality, what we’re saying is no — we’re actually at Layer 7. We’re actually at the data layer itself, and we’re protecting the data, the data packet, and we’re uniquely encrypting it in such a way that if the bad guy picks it up, they can’t get anything of value. And again, we’re removing the reliance on any third party for protecting your data. And really what we’re saying is you own your data, and you should own the data security that protects it, because that’s what we come in to do.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[03:28]
So you’re saying you have a different key or a hash technology, or you do something with the hardware security module that people have to use, or is it something else?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[03:28]
What’s really resonating with our customers is that it’s so easy for them to deploy. The reality is that what we’re doing is we’re actually generating keys for our customers, and we’re creating operational efficiencies for our customers in such a way that they don’t have to rely on VPN. They don’t have to rely, as I said, on the network operator to protect their data. We’re replacing every bit and byte and we’re obfuscating that data packet. And then when we’re sending that data packet, we’re actually rotating the key with each packet, and we’re generating a key on either side, so we’re not sending any private or public key anywhere. And what we’re doing here is we’re addressing that man-in-the-middle attack.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[04:18]
And are you doing this with some proprietary IP that you’ve developed?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[04:18]
We’ve got 11 patents on our technology. We’re FIPS 140-3 validated right now by NIST. And everything is done in such a way that it is a pure software play. We’re deployed, we’re consumable through AWS and through Azure today. So we’re a cloud-native solution, and we can either be consumed in the cloud or on-prem.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[04:37]
And by consumable, you mean it’s really easy — if somebody’s moved their applications to the cloud, has their data pipelines transitioning from AWS to Snowflake to on-site, the solution can be easily configured and dropped in without a large level of training and education having to go on? Or what’s the difference?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[04:52]
Really, that’s another thing that’s truly resonating with our customers today — the ease of implementation. In most cases, not every case, but in most cases, you can deploy our technology in under 60 minutes. And that is when it’s consumable through the cloud. When we’re actually protecting APIs, there’s really no change at all to the API configuration whatsoever. And in many cases, just a small amount of code is required to change — in essence, a junior developer can do it. And with our technology and our deployment mechanisms, we’re able to provide our customers with documentation and videos to actually make it very easy for them to deploy. And so far to date, we’ve had no issues at all with our customers, and our customer success stories have been fantastic.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[05:32]
And what’s your technology called? I mean, you’ve got Okta, you’ve got HashiCorp, you’ve got all these different acronyms.
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[05:32]
Yeah, so at Eclypses, we call our technology the Secure MTE Relay. And MTE stands for the MicroToken Exchange. The inventors of our technology said to themselves, if we can protect any form of data for payment processing, for credit card information, why can’t we protect anything? That’s where the idea was born from. And what it’s morphed into today is a technology that will protect any form of data. And when we define data — data to us, we’re data agnostic, so it doesn’t matter to us if it’s a sensor value, if it’s any type of document or spreadsheet or live-streaming video, or just as important, Joel, credentials, usernames and passwords. That is data to us.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[06:31]
Tell me this. You’ve mentioned you have customers. Are these little customers, are these big customers? Can you give an example of how some of your customers are deploying this now and the kind of feedback you’re getting from them?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[06:44]
Yeah, sure. Yeah, so Joel, we went live in the AWS Marketplace this past July. And just in the last four months, we’ve had over 12 new contracts that have come forward from large-scale enterprises to smaller — I’m going to say even smaller, mid-sized companies. So really what we’re focused on though is those regulated industries — healthcare, finance, critical infrastructure — organizations that are actually moving any type of sensitive data are really going to resonate with the solution that we have. But an example of one of our clients, which is a nationally known insurance agency with a number of affiliate organizations that sit underneath it — they’re actually using our MTE API Relay, which is securing their APIs, and what they’ve discovered is that they have hundreds of thousands of APIs that are really unmanaged and unsecured. And so what they’re doing is they’re leveraging our technology not only to secure the APIs internally within the organization itself; they’re creating a policy for their affiliate organizations. If they’re going to be sharing information with them through APIs, they’re actually mandating that those affiliate companies use the MTE API Relay to ensure that the data security is enabled at the third party as well.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[08:14]
Cool. And APIs is one thing that I think is really important, because you see so many systems being connected with APIs — homebuilt, MuleSoft, Boomi, SnapLogic, all these solutions that are being rolled out there. As far as I understand, you’re API agnostic when it comes to platform, because you’re looking fundamentally at the data and facilitating that, correct?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[08:35]
That is 100%. What we’ve done is, by looking at the applicable market for APIs — OWASP just put out a list of the top 10 API vulnerabilities — what we’ve been able to understand now is that just with the simple use of our technology, we actually directly address, out of the box, 8 out of the top 10 vulnerabilities as listed by OWASP. So the reality is that we see APIs, in essence — it’s a critical infrastructure, it’s a critical business technology that’s being used today, but it is a very unsecure entryway for these hackers to get in. There are so many unmanaged APIs within organizations today. There are so many what we call zombie APIs. And to be able to, in essence, protect every payload generated through the API —
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[09:27]
I think that’s spot on. I recently — in the news, there’ve been some big stories about cloud data providers and their customers having issues, and it’s traced back to APIs. A lot of systems they thought could just transmit the data back and forth — and guess what, that increased their attack surface, and people took advantage of it. If you’re building a solution today, are you ready for quantum? How will your solution address some of their concerns?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[09:53]
Yeah, well, let’s talk about quantum computing right now, because we know it’s coming — it’s probably going to be here sooner rather than later. And what’s interesting enough is, I think it was on August 12th this past year, NIST actually came out with a recommendation for encryption algorithms to be used to be quantum resistant. One of the recommended algorithms that was put out was CRYSTALS-Kyber. Now, with Eclypses, with our MTE technology, our Eclypses cryptographic library has always been built on what we call NIST-approved algorithms. We rebuilt our algorithm about two years ago. We placed a bet — and our engineers, I think, did some research and were some forward-looking guys as well — and we actually chose CRYSTALS-Kyber to be part of our cryptographic library. So we can now say with confidence that by using our technology, you are implementing a quantum-resistant solution.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[10:53]
One last thing I’m curious about is, do you bring this to market directly with AWS, or do you also work with partners? And what are some examples of how you’ve worked with partners?
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[10:53]
Oh no, Joel, we definitely — we are building an entire partner ecosystem. We are in the AWS partner network, the marketplace network. We’ll actually be going live in the Azure partner network, I would say, in the next 30 days. And then we have a goal of actually going live, potentially, in the Google marketplace in Q1 of 2025. We’ve got a number of partners in place today. Some of them are managed service providers, some are system integrators, and then others are — I’m going to call them risk and advisory consulting organizations — that are bringing us in because, in reality, with the use of our technology, we are mitigating risk within the organization. We’re actually allowing companies to operate their business with confidence, knowing that in the event of a breach, their data is still protected. And so the risk and advisory consulting firms are very happy to bring us in to their clients.
Joel Martin — Executive Research Leader, Applications Modernization Services, HFS Research[12:01]
Well — multi-cloud, API-ready, data-centric, partner-friendly. It’s a great story. So thank you for joining me on this videocast. As always, I learned something new when we talk. So have a great day. Thanks, David.
David Gomes — CEO, Eclypses[12:25]
Joel, thank you very much. I really appreciate it, and anytime I can be on with you is an absolute pleasure.
