One to watch: Timus Networks

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Harry Brelsford  00:04

Hey nation nation, we're back. This is a very special occasion with Pinar from Timus Networks. Now, how are you doing today?

Pinar Ormeci  00:12

Thanks very, I'm doing well, how are you?

Harry Brelsford  00:15

Good, good. And I want to thank you, first of all, for supporting SMB Nation, you've been very good about that. So we want to return the favor. And just have a free flowing conversation and tell your story, maybe a little bit about yourself a lot about your company and maybe one or two things that are coming up. I know you made a new hire. So let's let's start with you. What's your background? How did you get to where you're at?

Pinar Ormeci  00:39

I'm the CEO of Timis networks, a zero trust network security solution for small medium businesses through the MSP channel. So I recently started tmos networks around four months ago, I actually to be honest, it's been five months. Wow, time is time travels and time goes really fast when you're having fun. Before that, I was at Lookout, another cybersecurity company and I was heading the global partner business for the consumer side. And we actually exited that business successfully, to F secure a public company. And both lookout and F secure our 80% partner business driven. So that was a pretty decent success on our side. And that's basically I got plugged in to be the CEO of Timo, so I'm not the founder, I'm a CEO that was brought in from the outside. Before look out, I actually worked both in a couple of startups, high growth, West Coast based startups, but also in pretty large companies like Qualcomm, Ericsson, my career started pretty much at Qualcomm first as a systems engineer. So my background is in electrical engineering. And from there on, I moved into the more business side of things, because it's, it's almost as much fun there. In the business side, as well.

Harry Brelsford  02:16

Well, and what I've seen, I mean, speaking only for myself and your young person, but but I'm not in what I've seen as a natural progression. I used to carry the bag back in the Windows servers day, as we said, right to 2am downloading drivers. And then as I matured, in the product matured, I shifted over to the business side, right. And that's a fairly natural progression, maybe it get your degree in engineering. And then 30 years later, you're a CEO. Right? Very common.

Pinar Ormeci  02:48

100%. I mean, in my case, it's it's taken me Yeah, 20 years, I guess, in the in the career path, but that's exactly right, Harry.

Harry Brelsford  02:59

Yeah. Yeah. And we're, where are you based? Where's your company based? Are y'all virtual?

Pinar Ormeci  03:04

We are all virtual. So we are all using teams connect on our devices as a zero trust network security company ourselves. I'm based in New York City, we have around 6065 people in our company. And yeah, so we have our software development teams in Eastern Europe, in Turkey, and we have a whole goal to market arm in the in the US. All virtual.

Harry Brelsford  03:32

Okay, let's talk about your product stack. So give me the elevator pitch. I just got on an elevator with you. We're in Kuala Lumpur. It's a very tall building. So you have you have a few minutes to tell me what's what's, what's your secret sauce?

Pinar Ormeci  03:46

Sure, we like to say that we are the network security platform for the cloud era. And what we mean by that is the modern workforce is a workforce that pretty much can work from anywhere, right? So nobody's tied into the office anymore. And in this scenario, how do we protect your corporate network? And how do we protect the sensitive data? How do we protect your business from ransomware, getting hacked, getting the data breaches. And this really goes through zero trust, which means never trust always verify. And that really means is, before you allow anybody into your network, to your apps to your data, you have to make sure not only their credentials, check out username and password, but also their identity and the context of the call or the connection that they are trying to make. So before we allow anyone into our clients, networks, we look at things what device they are using, what was the when was the last time they access? Which location are they coming from? Did they do an impossible travel? Is there email work email in the dark web? So we look at at least nine criteria contextual Before we allow anyone touch the corporate resources, and God forbid, if a hacker does get in the blast radius will be much smaller than a traditional VPN, where a hacker can get lateral access to the full network once they steal the VPN credentials.

Harry Brelsford  05:20

Yeah, and I see you've been active in some events and some other things. Thank you. You participated in MSP rescue in Princeton we had Yep. On stage. I appreciate that. What other events have you been in? Because I've seen you you guys have been a little bit busy.

Pinar Ormeci  05:35

Yes, we have a very somewhat of a new company. We are coming from the firewall. Background. So we started as a hardware appliance based firewall company in Europe. And a year and a half ago, we moved our routes to the US. And we Philip up everything to the United States. The reason I'm saying that is so we are relatively new. We are not we are still establishing ourselves in the MSP. We are 100% MSP driven, right. So we'd never compete with our MSP partners. So as a continuation of that, we are really attending a lot of the events. So we were also in channel pro in Boston. We are we were in it builds live events. With it by design team in Orlando. We are going to be in Miami. Actually, my team is our we will have a team in ASCII in DC this week. Oh Caskey edge. And we're going to be in Miami in channel futures. beginning of November and then of course it nation in Orlando. Good.

Harry Brelsford  06:44

Yeah. I'll see it it nation so well. Yeah, there's gonna be

Pinar Ormeci  06:47

a lot of people in it nation. Oh, yeah. I'm talking is going to be there. So definitely come to the booths at our booth.

Harry Brelsford  06:55

Yeah. What's the URL for your company, please?

Pinar Ormeci  06:59

Sure. It's www dot tmos. Ti M U S. networks.com.

Harry Brelsford  07:07

Okay, great. And then finally, you made a well known hire. And the reason I'm kind of I'm kind of prodding you is. This gentleman is very well known in the SMB Nation. And I'll hand it over to you tell, tell me about what helps Mike helping Yeah.

Pinar Ormeci  07:24

So we have done actually a couple of really good hires. So let me just briefly, Brian Bourdain. He's the CFO of new charter technologies, you know, one of the biggest private equity firms that has MSP so he's on our advisory board. The other is Arish Bardiani. He used to be the VP of Sales for Daddo when they went through their whole crazy journey with the IPOs through their acquisition with Casaya. And now Mike Hanover. Yeah, who also wasn't that? Oh, yes. So he's joining us to help us with some of the strategic partnerships that we are looking to create with adjacent cybersecurity solutions. So we are super excited to be working with all these three gentlemen.

Harry Brelsford  08:14

Yeah, nobody better and I think you've got them slotted in the right role, because in our space, unlike, in I give the speech, often if we were talking about the pharmaceutical industry. And if you were at Santa Fe, and I was at Bear, we actually cannot partner. Right? We in pharmacy, we can't do it. But in our space partner to partner is a big thing. Right. And we still do it. I hope the day comes where we don't lose that community spirit.

Pinar Ormeci  08:48

Absolutely. And and I think it's it works for the MSPs as well. Right? Look, seeing these synergies together between cybersecurity vendors and how vendors together can become more than two, you know, one plus one and so absolutely. So I agree with you.

Harry Brelsford  09:08

Well, great. Well, I sure appreciate your time, and I'm going to see you in just a couple of weeks. I just made my airline and hotel reservations to it nation and folks, this will be posted up just before it nation so I don't I don't want to you know, do some time travel on you. But this will be up before it nation and I'll see you there.

Pinar Ormeci  09:30

Thanks so much, Harry. Very thank you. Bye