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BeyondID Founder’s Story: Q&A with Arun Shrestha

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THE FOUNDER’S STORY: A Q&A WITH ARUN SHRESTHA

What prompted you to start BeyondID?

I’ve had the good fortune to work inside some of the best technology companies in the world, from building services organizations at early integration and identity pioneers like SeeBeyond and Okta, to managing large enterprise software and services teams at Sun Microsystem and Oracle. That experience showed me that, even with the best technology, getting everything to work together inside a large enterprise can be very messy and few organizations have the skills and resources to do it well. This is especially true in security and identity, where the complexity is high but so are the risks.

When I joined Okta in 2012 to build its customer success and services organization, the company had less than 50 employees and less than 100 customers. The idea of using a cloud service to manage identity was a pretty new concept, and I spent 5 years traveling around the globe helping some of Okta’s biggest customers see the impact it could have on their business. We were incredibly successful and Okta soon had more than 3600 customers!  But I missed being an entrepreneur and felt it was my time to give back to the world that has given me so much. I have worked for some incredible brands over the years, and I wanted to build my own and put the knowledge I had gained into action.

So my co-founders and I started BeyondID, a cloud systems integrator and managed service provider for identity and cybersecurity, to help enterprises operate in a different way. Cloud is all about speed and agility, yet most of the big SIs are still optimized for the on-prem world with giant deals that take months or years to finish. We want to free customers from the tyranny of this old GSI model.

You’ve been building successful services teams for a long time and seen a lot of technology shifts over the years. What’s one of your secrets to success?

I’ve worked with thousands of global companies, representing some of the most iconic tech brands out there – Sun, Oracle and now Okta. What’s been consistent across every successful customer engagement is having a service mindset — doing everything possible to turn a customer into a Raving Fan. My secret to success is assembling great teams across the globe who embody that service mindset, and channeling my team’s focus and energy on making every customer a raving fan.

What’s your company’s mission and why are you so passionate about it?

Our mission is to help companies become secure, agile and future-proof. We use those words very deliberately.

By secure, we mean that we want to be a force for good in the world. There are a lot of negative forces at play today with cybercrime and false information. The technology that is supposed to make people happier and more productive, can harm society and the economy. We want to help businesses put the safeguards into place so people can trust again, can trust them with their data.

By agile, we mean helping businesses use cloud as a platform for growth. This next wave of the cloud is fundamentally changing the way people build and scale a business. It’s a foundation for invention and innovation, and it lets businesses move faster than they ever could before. If we started BeyondID 10 years ago, we couldn’t move half as fast as we can today.

By future-proof, we mean helping businesses adopt an architecture that will help them become more resilient as things change and evolve. Because they will! If a business is building on top of the right technology, running services in the cloud, they can ride the wave of innovation happening at that foundational layer without being distracted from their core competency – serving their customers.

What three words would you use to describe your culture?

1) Innovation; 2) Integrity; and 3) Growth. We are innovative, with a high degree of integrity and focused on growth.

What makes the BeyondID team special?

Our global team is dedicated to the success of our customers, making every one of our customers a Raving Fan of BeyondID. Despite the fact that our team operates from many different locations, we are united in that purpose and it motivates us every day. Our focus on customer success is at the core of our business and helps drive our objectives, both as individuals and as an organization.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity (or challenge) for enterprises in this next wave of cloud computing?

Enterprises face a number of challenges in their digital transformation journey, including the security of their cloud environment, connecting their legacy systems with cloud applications, and managing implementation and technical support, all while controlling costs. BeyondID helps businesses across industries overcome these challenges so they can increase revenue, reduce costs and improve their customers’ experience.

Why do you feel Tercera is the perfect partner for you?

Tercera has the foresight to recognize the Third Wave of cloud computing will fundamentally change the market dynamics within cloud services, and the professional service organizations that support the vendors and customers in that market. Now service providers are not only a key component to an organization’s success, but also at the center of how an organization acquires, manages and deploys the applications needed to safely manage their users and resources. As former enterprise business operators, Tercera’s founders bring the experience, counsel, vast network connections and the growth capital required to accelerate our growth. We believe BeyondID and other companies will greatly benefit from Tercera’s expertise and their focus on helping growth-stage organizations succeed.

BeyondID secures $9M in series A funding from Tercera

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Tercera’s Investment Spotlights the Market Opportunity for BeyondID’s Identity and Cybersecurity Services, and the Growth for Services in the Third Wave of Cloud Computing

 

San Francisco, CA – February 8, 2021 – BeyondID, a leading System Integrator (SI) and Managed Service Provider (MSP) for cybersecurity and cloud services, today announced it closed a Series A funding round of $9 million from Tercera. The financing was provided by Tercera, an investment and advisory company specializing in the $460B cloud professional services market.

BeyondID helps companies acquire, deploy and manage best-of-breed cybersecurity and cloud services to become more secure, agile and prepared for the future. The company is a Platinum Services partner for Okta, and specializes in Identity and Access Management, Secure App Modernization, Zero Trust Security, Cloud Migration and Integration Services.

“We are thrilled to partner with Tercera to expand our footprint in the Okta ecosystem and broaden our identity and cybersecurity offerings,” said Arun Shrestha, CEO and co-founder of BeyondID. “Tercera’s investment will help us meet the growing demand organizations have for more secure access to their critical data and higher performing cloud identity solutions.”

BeyondID has been a top partner for Okta, the leading identity platform in the enterprise, for nearly three years. It has earned Okta’s Platinum partnership for consistently delivering joint customer successes and for building one of the largest teams of Okta certified experts to solve complex use cases.

“The BeyondID team has been an invaluable part of our partner ecosystem for many years, working with us on some of our largest customers,” said Frederic Kerrest, Executive Vice Chairman, Chief Operating Officer, and co-founder of Okta. “They’ve played a vital role in helping our customers solve their most complex security and cloud computing challenges, and we’re excited to see BeyondID continue to meet the needs of our customers and grow with us.”

“Tercera is on a mission to identify and empower people and businesses who will lead the cloud’s Third Wave, and we couldn’t be more excited to have BeyondID as our first portfolio partner,” said Chris Barbin, CEO and founder of Tercera. “BeyondID exemplifies the kind of company that customers want to work with in this new wave – agile, focused, growth minded and customer-centric. A company with the specialized skills, technology and services to meet the evolving security needs and demands of today’s businesses and their remote workforce.”

BeyondID has served hundreds of enterprises that include ATN International, Bain Capital, Biogen, Discount Tire, FedEx, Gundersen Health Systems, Johnson Financial Group and Major League Baseball.

“ATN relied on BeyondID’s expertise to deploy our Identity and Access Management solution from Okta, on time and on budget,” said Benjamin Doyle, vice president of Information Technology at ATN International. “As a result of our successful engagement, we’ve expanded our relationship to help with our Zero Trust strategy. I’m excited to work with BeyondID in this incredibly important aspect of our business.”

For more information about BeyondID, please visit www.beyondid.com. To learn more about Tercera, visit tercera.io.

 

About BeyondID
BeyondID is a leading provider of managed identity services to help companies acquire, deploy and manage their cybersecurity and cloud service needs. BeyondID enables organizations to streamline their adoption process and ensure that their implementations are secure, agile and future proof. A few of the customers that trust BeyondID to keep their organizations secure include FedEx, ATN International, Bain Capital, Biogen, Discount Tire, Gundersen Health Systems, Johnson Financial Group and Major League Baseball.

 

Tercera
Tercera is a new kind of investment and advisory firm founded to accelerate the growth of people-centric businesses. Specializing in the $460B cloud professional services market, the Tercera team is composed of invested operators who know first-hand what it takes to build and scale a successful cloud services business. Tercera (Spanish for ‘third’) is on a mission to identify the people and partners who will lead the next wave of cloud computing – the Third Wave – and provide them with the capital, counsel and connections they need to scale faster and take an outsized share of the market.

BeyondID

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THE FOUNDER’S STORY: A Q&A WITH ARUN SHRESTHA

What prompted you to start BeyondID?

I’ve had the good fortune to work inside some of the best technology companies in the world, from building services organizations at early integration and identity pioneers like SeeBeyond and Okta, to managing large enterprise software and services teams at Sun Microsystem and Oracle. That experience showed me that, even with the best technology, getting everything to work together inside a large enterprise can be very messy and few organizations have the skills and resources to do it well. This is especially true in security and identity, where the complexity is high but so are the risks.

When I joined Okta in 2012 to build its customer success and services organization, the company had less than 50 employees and less than 100 customers. The idea of using a cloud service to manage identity was a pretty new concept, and I spent 5 years traveling around the globe helping some of Okta’s biggest customers see the impact it could have on their business. We were incredibly successful and Okta soon had more than 3600 customers!  But I missed being an entrepreneur and felt it was my time to give back to the world that has given me so much. I have worked for some incredible brands over the years, and I wanted to build my own and put the knowledge I had gained into action.

So my co-founders and I started BeyondID, a cloud systems integrator and managed service provider for identity and cybersecurity, to help enterprises operate in a different way. Cloud is all about speed and agility, yet most of the big SIs are still optimized for the on-prem world with giant deals that take months or years to finish. We want to free customers from the tyranny of this old GSI model.

You’ve been building successful services teams for a long time and seen a lot of technology shifts over the years. What’s one of your secrets to success?

I’ve worked with thousands of global companies, representing some of the most iconic tech brands out there – Sun, Oracle and now Okta. What’s been consistent across every successful customer engagement is having a service mindset — doing everything possible to turn a customer into a Raving Fan. My secret to success is assembling great teams across the globe who embody that service mindset, and channeling my team’s focus and energy on making every customer a raving fan.

What’s your company’s mission and why are you so passionate about it?

Our mission is to help companies become secure, agile and future-proof. We use those words very deliberately.

By secure, we mean that we want to be a force for good in the world. There are a lot of negative forces at play today with cybercrime and false information. The technology that is supposed to make people happier and more productive, can harm society and the economy. We want to help businesses put the safeguards into place so people can trust again, can trust them with their data.

By agile, we mean helping businesses use cloud as a platform for growth. This next wave of the cloud is fundamentally changing the way people build and scale a business. It’s a foundation for invention and innovation, and it lets businesses move faster than they ever could before. If we started BeyondID 10 years ago, we couldn’t move half as fast as we can today.

By future-proof, we mean helping businesses adopt an architecture that will help them become more resilient as things change and evolve. Because they will! If a business is building on top of the right technology, running services in the cloud, they can ride the wave of innovation happening at that foundational layer without being distracted from their core competency – serving their customers.

What three words would you use to describe your culture?

1) Innovation; 2) Integrity; and 3) Growth. We are innovative, with a high degree of integrity and focused on growth.

What makes the BeyondID team special?

Our global team is dedicated to the success of our customers, making every one of our customers a Raving Fan of BeyondID. Despite the fact that our team operates from many different locations, we are united in that purpose and it motivates us every day. Our focus on customer success is at the core of our business and helps drive our objectives, both as individuals and as an organization.

What do you think is the biggest opportunity (or challenge) for enterprises in this next wave of cloud computing?

Enterprises face a number of challenges in their digital transformation journey, including the security of their cloud environment, connecting their legacy systems with cloud applications, and managing implementation and technical support, all while controlling costs. BeyondID helps businesses across industries overcome these challenges so they can increase revenue, reduce costs and improve their customers’ experience.

Why do you feel Tercera is the perfect partner for you?

Tercera has the foresight to recognize the Third Wave of cloud computing will fundamentally change the market dynamics within cloud services, and the professional service organizations that support the vendors and customers in that market. Now service providers are not only a key component to an organization’s success, but also at the center of how an organization acquires, manages and deploys the applications needed to safely manage their users and resources. As former enterprise business operators, Tercera’s founders bring the experience, counsel, vast network connections and the growth capital required to accelerate our growth. We believe BeyondID and other companies will greatly benefit from Tercera’s expertise and their focus on helping growth-stage organizations succeed.

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