Software Veteran John Mutch Moves IT Security Specialist BeyondTrust to San Diego, on Path to Build “Freemium” Business Model
free version of something as important as the IT security software needed to help U.S. public companies satisfy the section 404 requirements of Sarbanes-Oxley.
John Mutch
In an e-mail response this morning, he writes: “The business has changed. The process of learning about new technologies, acquiring demonstration of those technologies and executing a proof of concept can be done most efficiently through the Web. With a high “clutter factor” companies must offer value in everything they provide in order to attract interest. So the use of the freemium model accomplishes this.” He also notes that the employee doing the shopping is more often a mid-level IT manager, who is presumably more comfortable with the freemium model.
BeyondTrust’s technology attempts to provide IT and corporate governance executives the ability to ‘monitor the monitors’ in IT—such as a rogue system administrator who otherwise might have access to everything in the network, Mutch says. In this age of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance woes, Mutch says, BeyondTrust aims to address compliance concerns that might be raised by a company’s outside auditors. For example, he says an auditor might ask: “‘Do you have security and a lockdown over your IT infrastructure? Can the segregation of duties be maintained? Can the same guy who issues an invoice to a vendor also write a check to a vendor? How do you know? And [how do you] protect against that?'”
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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