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Proctor: ColdSpark's CEO building a better e-mail system

Published October 30, 2006 at midnight

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Forget building a better mousetrap. How about a better e-mail system?

Broomfield-based ColdSpark is all about e-mail, from network design, to deployment, to security. The company works with businesses that need e-mail help and has a customer base that includes Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, Viacom and Equifax.

Kelly Wanser, ColdSpark's chief executive officer (she co-founded the company in 2001 with Scott Brown, now its chief technology officer), said her company has fewer than 100 employees but is looking to hire. She recently spoke by phone with Mile High Tech Editor Darrell Proctor:

Proctor: Enterprise e-mail infrastructure. People know e-mail, but they might not know EEI. Why is it important?

Wanser: Most people aren't aware that e-mail has become the No. 1 form of communication for businesses. But the applications that move messages across servers, that's based on 20-year- old technology. Even the high-end security products, like Symantec, still run on the (old) technology.

It's like running the city of Los Angeles on two-lane roads. You've got very state-of-the-art (systems) running on this old plumbing.

Proctor: And your job is to convince companies they need your help.

Wanser: The biggest companies are beginning to see how a new type of infrastructure can help them and save them money. We're like the trucks and planes that carry the messages.

Proctor: There's a lot of talk about e-mail and privacy. How does your company's business impact that?

Wanser: What we do is facilitate the deployment of SOA (service-oriented architecture) tools. We enable companies to deploy the tools that are available.

Take encrypted e-mail. It's important for security, but encryption clogs the pipes. So we make that (type of security) work for companies.

Proctor: What are some of the technologies your company uses?

Wanser: We're basically a Java shop, but we integrate with lots of different products in the security space, like compliance, with security products like Symantec and McAfee. We're pretty hardware agnostic.

Proctor: You recently named Gregor Freund, an enterprise security expert, to your board of directors. What was the motivation behind that?

Wanser: He's actually an investor in ColdSpark. He's really one of the leading minds in Internet technology. He coined the term spyware. He correctly predicted where some of the security market would go. He's a really strong adviser to the company. We're lucky to have him.

Proctor: Ric Rodriguez (a former Navy SEAL) also recently came on board, and he's well-known here and globally because of his work with Webroot. Was getting him to join ColdSpark a real coup for your business?

Wanser: He did such a fabulous job at Web- root, we couldn't resist having him build the engineering team at ColdSpark.

His presence is very important for us. We're building very high-performance, Tier 1, mission- control infrastructure software, creating a very bulletproof infrastructure for the largest enterprises in the world.

Proctor: You're scheduled to release the latest version of SparkEngine soon. How will it be different from the previous version?

Wanser: The next version of our SparkEngine, we will expand the capabilities, what we call policies, or what is done with the (e-mail) traffic. We get to accommodate some really interesting business challenges.

Say, a broker is out of the office, so a(n)(e-mail) message to them is redirected to a broker who's in the office. This is money for them.

Proctor: Who are some of your largest customers?

Wanser: Bank of America, Washington Mutual, Fidelity Investments. We actually spent two or three years developing our software. We shipped our first software in 2003.

Proctor: How do you see the growth prospects for your company?

Wanser: We're in a very high area of demand. We're growing rapidly. We are hiring in Java engineering, systems administration and project management.