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Quantum Secure: The Godfather of Physical Identity & Access Management Industry

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Ajay Jain, President & CEO,Vik Ghai, CTO & VP

Ajay Jain, President & CEO

Vik Ghai, CTO & VP

There are entrepreneurs who become leaders by following the paths others created. And then there are legends who create these paths. Serial entrepreneurs Ajay Jain and Vik Ghai are the two exemplary legends who not just created the PIAM (Physical Identity & Access Management) market segment, but took over the entire world by storm through their contrivance Quantum Secure in 2005. The duo grew the company with a meager fund of $4.5 million that they received in series A from Dunrath Capital dramatically until its acquisition by HID Global early this year. "Very rarely an enterprise software company is built with such a small investment. The journey has been extremely positive and satisfying with explosive growth. We were able to create a new market segment, demonstrated its leadership skills and offered something meaningful to the customers," asserts a proud Ajay, President & CEO, Quantum Secure.

It all started with the right thinking process and strategic vision. The duo was not just able to detect the problems associated with Identity & Access Management quite accurately, but also anticipated what solution will eradicate the problem from its root. "As we evolved from early stages, we continually realigned and adjusted our business operation model with our long term strategy. Once you get these right, impeccable execution is the key," asserts Ajay. This required hiring right talent to keep the moral of the organization at high spirit always, and developing a unique culture in the organization with leadership as example. "Our collective team was very strong from the early stages of the company. This led the management towards growth and helped keeping a laser focused approach towards our strategy," he further adds. Today Quantum is the leader in the segment and boasts of several Fortune 500 customers, federal government agencies, large airports and financial institutions as customers.

Always embracing a family style, complete open door work culture, Quantum has sharpened its edges as a customer-centric organization with a goal to place them first. "Our people understand and appreciate that. In our company, there are no egos or politics amongst people or departments. What you see is what you get," explains Ajay. The company also fosters all levels of employees to participate in the decision making and process improvement process. The employees feel connected with the product they build and other fellow colleagues as much as the founders or other senior leaders feel.

Being in the Right Business for Right Purpose
Quantum is in the business of ensuring right identity at the right physical place with right access privileges and at the right time (an identity is defined as any person using your facility, which could be an employee, contractor, vendor, visitor, family members and others). This ensures that insider threats are minimized by providing security principles at the perimeter level and at the operator level. Associated with PIAM is a host of industry and government regulations that must be complied with at all times. Quantum continues to be a focused company in that space as well by providing solutions to enable corporate compliance in a streamlined and automated way.

And since 2007, Quantum has been both the category creator and market leader for PIAM. The company's product leadership in PIAM is based on truly understanding the customer needs & problems specific to industries and then providing the most technically advanced solution. This allows Quantum to focus on defined set of problems and differentiate from me too competitors.

Several strategies have been framed to maintain this leadership including customer centric approach that has helped Quantum sustain its differentiation in the market. Additionally, strong R&D
process keeps Quantum ahead of the market by several years. These approaches have also helped the company drive product innovation to develop new modules, better products, automated processes and business models that continue to grant it the competitive edge over competitors.

Always embracing a familystyle complete open door work culture quantum has sharpened its edges as a customer – centric organization with a goal to place them first


The Alarming Situation
Internal attacks cost millions to businesses, but they choose to remain mum until forced to disclose a breach. While most of the employees do not intend to harm their employer, there is no way to ensure that's the case with all of an organization's employees. On the contrary, external hacks are no less critical than the internal one. Hence, it becomes essential to manage not just the employees, but visitors and contractors with different risk levels from on board to off board to physical access provisioning and auto tracks. The best practice is to be cautious and take appropriate steps to detect and mitigate these attacks.

But the security department has countless manual processes to accomplish any number of these tasks. Now this is for just one physical identity. But what if you have 100,000 people, all interacting with different departments that have their own policies, procedures and compliance issue across a global organization? This leads organizations to invest heavily in new security infrastructure, hire more staff and spend tons of money; but this doesn't fix the root problem as the process to manage people are still manual.

But with Quantum's SAFE, one can easily fix this root problem as it helps to centrally manage all of the physical attendees in an organization by connecting you with existing physical security infrastructure, standardize existing security policies, safely closes your security loopholes and enforces the rules you established across all enterprise systems keeping your organization compliant with industry regulations and company policies. SAFE not just works with over 100 physical security and access control systems, but also automates background & watch list checks and enforces compliance to regulations across diverse facilities. By automating with SAFE, one can end manual process and streamline, thus saving millions of dollars and huge amount of time.

SAFE - The Magical Elixir
In creating SAFE, Quantum pioneered physical security industry's first and most comprehensive enterprise software - designed to manage and streamline security identities, compliance and correlate with events across disparate physical security systems. SAFE is built using patented technology for policy-based physical security system for restricting access to computer resources and data flow through network equipment as well as enabling data from disparate physical security systems to be normalized for visual rule creation representing security systems, data and processes. Today, SAFE Software Suite remains as the leading solution for managing identities and provisioning access in physical security infrastructure.

Marquee organizations across the world have recognized the unique value proposition of Quantum and are using SAFE to streamline their physical security operations. Organizations of all types have turned their investment in SAFE into a strong RoI, and in the process have minimized the risk of theft/fraud and non-compliance. Quantum's partners in both physical and logical security spaces, including GE, Johnson Controls, United Technologies /Lenel, Tyco/Software House, Oracle, Wipro Technologies, Siemens, Unisys and Microsoft, have helped the company bring the suite to the market.

Innovation in Making
Quantum believes that the market for PIAM products and services will expand to over $2 billion by 2020, which will primarily be driven by concerns around being able to provide security and to ensure
compliance to regulations in a cost effective manner. The future, on the other hand, exists in making security organizations more predictive in their approach by leveraging analytics and big data strategy to help security transition from being a reactive resource to a proactive resource and a strategic business partner that plays a key role in business growth.

Quantum Secure is driving the market innovation by enabling predictive analytics based solutions. The company is enhancing product and delivery capabilities that will allow clients to leverage complex machine learning algorithms with SAFE analyzing data (in real-time) looking for statistical trends to measure which policies are effectively enforced, and which risk controls are ineffectively applied, detect insider threat and others.

In the coming days, SAFE, for Predictive Security, will be armed with identifying the highest probability risks in time, automating appropriate actions, minimizing security and compliance risks and maximizing the value of limited budgets by addressing highest needs first. The company will continue to launch more additions to predictive security over coming months. It will also expand internationally, continue to develop killer products for the PIAM market and preserve its leadership position in the space with innovation and commitment.

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Key Management:
Ajay Jain, President & CEO

A serial entrepreneur, Ajay's two startups were acquired by Versant Corp and Pivotal, while he also held senior and executive management positions at Clarify, Qdecor and Netscape. In his stint as the CEO of Quantum, Ajay is responsible for setting the company's vision and strategy along with managing daily operations.

Vik Ghai, CTO & VP - Products. Prior to co-founding Quantum Secure, Vik created and sold his startup Mokume Software to Versant Corp. Before this, he worked with TRW, Smith Kline Beecham and Checkpiont Systems. In his current role, Vik is responsible for product vision and development.

Clients: Symantec, Adobe, oracle, General Motors, Comcast, AMD, AT&T, Verizon, United Health Group, Salesforce.com, U.S. Department of Energy, Health & Treasury and several more. The company also has several Airport Customers like Boston Logan, Phoenix Sky Harbor, and San Francisco Airport amongst others.

Offerings:
- SAFE Suite comprising of 30 modules to automate various security functions
- SAFE Physical Identity & Access Manager
- SAFE Compliance Regulator
- SAFE Predictive Security

Awards & Recognitions:
- Won Security Products New Product of the Year-2015 in the Convergence & Integrated Software Solutions
- SAFE for Secure Cloud Solution won the New Product of the Year Award from Security Products Magazine for Cloud Computing and Storage-2014
- Won GSN Award for Best Platform for Physical & Logical Access- 2013.

Case Study:
The first Olympic and Paralympic Games in South America, the Rio 2016 Organizing Committee needed to efficiently manage 160,000+ people accessing 37 large and small venues, with four million Olympics and 1.5 million Paralympics access transactions in total and 60,000 access checks per day per venue. The committee required central system used by security agents from Security FA and volunteers from Event Services to manage the access to Rio 2016 identities.

Quantum's SAFE not just mitigated this issue but also helped in real-time credential validation for Visual check comparison with credential photo and person's face, system status verification on computer and mobile phone, and allowed/denied entrance as per SAFE application. Only one system was used in the competition precincts, Olympic and Paralympic Village, Rio 2016 Headquarter, Olympic Family Official Hotel and training facilities, at all installation entrance gates of accredited people and vehicle.