thing to make a quick profit,” Ryan says. He believes the market has grossly undervalued the company, and he wants to drive St. Bernard forward, despite the difficult economy. “You only get there one way, and that’s to build a company of recognized value.”
Still, that’s a tall order when the company’s business is focused on Internet security and its stock trades over-the-counter at 13 cents a share
“It’s an extremely competitive market, but I didn’t get into this business because I believed there was a green field opportunity here,” Ryan says. “We substantially have to improve both the product and our market.”
St. Bernard was founded in 1995 as a data security business with a flagship software product called Open File Manager, which the company sold in 2007. Today St. Bernard has more than 100 employees, and a market valuation of just less than $2 million.
Ryan wouldn’t provide much insight about his plans for St. Bernard, except to say his roadmap calls for a combination of both new technology development and an expanded business strategy for existing and new markets. Ryan says he’s found untapped technologies within the company, and he has numerous ideas about how to add interesting capabilities to St. Bernard’s iPrism, an Internet appliance that filters the packet flow in and out of a network.
“When I came here, I found a technology company with some ideas that were not being developed, a really smart group of people, 5,000 mostly happy customers, and a pretty good balance sheet,” Ryan says. “The way I look at it, I’ve got a well-funded startup with about $20 million a year in revenue.”
