Bridging the Frontier 
Bob Smith, Executive Director
Bob Smith is Executive Director of the ESD Alliance responsible for its management and operations. Previously, Bob was senior vice president of Marketing and Business Development at Uniquify, responsible for brand development, positioning, strategy and business development activities. Bob began his … More » Meet the New Cylynt, Fighting Software Piracy Around the GlobeJuly 6th, 2020 by Bob Smith, Executive Director
Ted Miracco and everyone at Cylynt (pronounced sī-lənt) could be considered real-life Marvel Comics crimefighters as they battle software piracy around the globe. I recently spoke to Ted who is CEO of this ESD Alliance member company. We discussed the recent name change from SmartFlow Compliance Solutions to Cylynt, its success as an anti-piracy and cybersecurity crime stopper and move to become a software-as-a-service (SaaS) market intelligence platform.  Ted Miracco, CEO of Cylynt Is there a market for anti-piracy software? My answer is a definitive yes. The market opportunity for this type of software is huge. The BSA Software Alliance found that nearly 40% of all software installations worldwide are being used illegally. Software companies are losing more than $46 billion of potential revenue a year. Many companies use license managers to protect their software IP. License managers are good at providing a check-in and check-out mechanism for companies that want to pay for software and they are well served. Large enterprise-wide users can deploy a license manager on a server with a number of licenses and provide access to those licenses with various software monetization strategies. License managers generally do not prevent software piracy, and they are also susceptible to commercial overuse or over-deployment. For example, a multinational company could be using a “North America only” license that follows the sun 24/7. Another common instance of over-deployment occurs by rehosting a license, while continuing to use the software on the old computer. Outright piracy can occur when a rogue employee installs a counterfeit license, or a bogus website or corrupt reseller sells counterfeit software as the genuine product. All legitimate companies need to know if this type of software was installed on their networks, as it is not only illegal, but also can come loaded with trojans and malware that can expose the company to IP theft and ransomware.
Cylynt was founded to help companies identify who’s using copies of their cracked software and understand the magnitude of the problem. We provide a SaaS portal to give our users a global snapshot of who’s using its software, how it is being used and whether it is being counterfeited, where it’s being cracked and how it’s being cracked. We can determine if the software came from the company or a certified partner, how much revenue is lost to piracy and the potential for recovering that revenue or converting unlicensed users to licensed users. What was the genesis of Cylynt? Cylynt started inauspiciously enough. I was a founder and executive vice president of AWR, now Cadence. We suspected that there was unauthorized use of our analog design software occurring. We developed technology that confirmed our suspicions and found a way to convert unauthorized users into paying customers. It was an internal project to protect our paying customers from unfair competition, but we also retrieved a lot of revenue from companies who were non-compliant with our license agreement either through lack of awareness or outright piracy. The result was far more successful than any of us would have thought. Intellectual property theft became my passion, partially out of concerns for national security, as the semiconductor industry and telecommunications companies were the primary victims. I left AWR in 2014 to take on this challenge and create a business identifying, reporting, and tracking piracy and to establish methods and procedures for combating software piracy domestically and internationally. That business today is known as Cylynt, a profitable and rapidly growing private company, that is expanding into tangential markets in usage analytics and software monetization. You mentioned a large installed base in EDA or what we consider to be electronic system design. What other market segments use Cylynt’s solutions and which internal groups care most about license compliance? Yes, we support the CAD/EDA market, as well as other markets closely aligned with EDA, much as you would expect since engineering is in our background, and part of the corporate DNA. Those markets include CAM, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), geographic information system (GIS), architectural and civil engineering, computer-generated imagery (CGI) and scientific and statistical analysis, all of whom offer expensive, on-premises software. As for who is most attuned to what we offer, we generally work with the CEOs and CFOs, general counsel, a company’s license compliance group and vice presidents of sales. CFOs are especially keen on our products because they can account for about 5-15% of their corporate revenue facilitated by Cylynt’s data analytics. We’re quite proud of the ROI and high customer retention rate we have (97%). And, Cylynt today? We rebranded as Cylynt on June 1, 2020. The name Cylynt better reflects our strategy and goals as we become a SaaS market intelligence platform enabling users to utilize analytics for business insights derived from a centralized data lake hosted in the AWS cloud. To do so, we improved our SmartFlow technology and data-driven tools to better help software companies maximize revenue, leverage usage analytics and protect their IP. Ultimately, we help them make informed business decisions, correct licensing problems, and prevent unfair competition. Of course, anti-piracy and cybersecurity will continue to be an important segment of our business. How has the pandemic affected Cylynt? All employees in our Los Angeles offices and our main development facility in Dublin, Ireland, are working from home without much disruption. Cybercriminals don’t sleep. They are also opportunists taking advantage of the work from home order and a reason for the rapid rise of cybercriminal activity during the chaos of COVID-19. We’re working closely with our users. Our software utilization data enables users to accurately measure the health and success of their software operations. What’s next for Cylynt? It’s an exhilarating time for us as we broaden our scope. We just announced a partnership with Thales, a French multinational company that designs and builds electrical systems and provides services for the aerospace, defense, transportation and security markets. We will jointly provide software developers with license compliance and management solutions that uncover and protect against misuse of software licenses through data-driven business intelligence and revenue-generation opportunities. Members of the ESD Alliance and SEMI can expect to see more from Cylynt as we continue building a richer SaaS-based portal with increased tools for more detailed data analytics and software monetization. Learn more about Cylynt at www.cylynt.com. Please send your comments to me. I can be reached at bsmith@semi.org. Engage with the ESD Alliance at: Website: www.esd-alliance.org ESD Alliance Bridging the Frontier blog: http://bit.ly/2oJUVzl Twitter: @ESDAlliance |
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