Joe Boyle, CEO & Co-Founder of Salt Communications, tells us how the company’s encrypted communication solution protects highly sensitive, strategic, and proprietary data.
Tell us about yourself, your career, and how you founded Salt Communications.
Joe Boyle: I was living in California, working for a high-tech networking company, and could not help but notice the dramatic shift towards mobility after the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 and Android in 2009.
Clearly, communication apps were changing how people use their phones, but they were mostly aimed at consumers. We saw the opportunity to build a system that offered all of the nice elements of the consumer apps but, while focusing on an organization’s security, allowed them to have full control of the system, remain compliant, and of course, keep their private communications secure.
With Salt Communications, we built the first holistic solution for closed encrypted communications between the users of mobile devices and the secure systems they use within the organization. Our product provides full centralized control for administrators, as well as federated interfaces to trusted internal services. Salt’s end users are busy professionals who need secure voice and video calls, messaging, and image/file transfer to make important decisions while on the move. Salt’s customers include global law firms, financial institutions, defense and security clients, oil and gas companies, and large enterprises across the globe.
Before Salt, I was the director of product management for Silver Peak Systems and Blue Coat.
Systems, both in the network optimization space and before that, I was employee number 4 at Replify, the first company to virtualize WAN optimization. I also worked on networking and communications technologies at F5 Networks and Aepona (acquired by Intel).
I began my career as a software engineer in Apion, which Phone.com acquired in 1999.
How does Salt Communications market its products/services online?
Joe Boyle: We spend a lot of time positioning ourselves as a key industry thought leaders, trying to educate businesses on why securing their communications is so important. We do a lot of this through digital marketing tactics such as email marketing campaigns, blog content, educational posts, and webinars. We’re not building a mass market solution and are very selective about the users of our system, so it is important that we inform and educate our target audience accordingly.
How has the coronavirus pandemic affected your business, and how did you get through it?
Joe Boyle: The only change we had to make is adjusting to all our staff working from home, which, to be honest, wasn’t a difficult change. Our staff adapted quickly and could work from anywhere. Having a secure communication system has definitely helped us maintain constant contact.
We’ve continued to hire and have not reduced our advertising spending during this period. Unlike many other businesses, we’ve been lucky to have continued developing opportunities and building out our pipeline during this period.
Since lockdown, there has been a huge move towards video conferencing technologies. We believe that, in the future, organizations will be much more willing to use this technology to provide flexibility to workers, reduce travel costs, and speed up decision-making and information sharing.
Many of these conversations are very sensitive, and the mainstream systems are not secure enough. We aim to be the leaders in secure communications for these companies who need to be able to interact and communicate securely anywhere in the world and, more commonly, not in the same room.
What specific tools, software, and management skills are you using to manage your online marketing?
Joe Boyle: Our app is the only app we use to communicate with each other securely when managing our online marketing. We use our own app daily to securely communicate with the marketing team to carry out scrum meetings and communications throughout the day. Regarding longer-term planning, we use a tool called Monday.com, where we can plan out the coming weeks’ marketing content and G-Suite to collaborate on marketing documents. To communicate with our partners and clients, we use Salt conference calls.
Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?
Joe Boyle: The majority of Salt’s competitors operate in the consumer market, offering secure communications for consumer use. These organizations believe that encryption alone is sufficient for security, but at Salt, we understand that while encryption is a fundamental aspect of communications until encryption is combined by the highest level of control, a communications system cannot be fully trusted.
Salt’s high-security system provides the same convenient user experience as consumer apps but in a safe and protected manner, enabling the customer to have full, centralized control of the system at all times.
Salt continues to work with clients to take on product feedback and ensure continuous innovation through feature development and industry integrations. This ensures we continue to evolve and stay ahead of the competition.
Your final thoughts?
Joe Boyle: Salt Communications is the best armor organizations have to protect trade secrets and other sensitive, strategic, and proprietary information when communicating on mobile devices. It is a software solution that is more than a secure mobile app: it has a web-based management platform for dynamic provisioning of secure mobile voice and text communications.
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