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As highlighted inSecurity opportunities in a cloud and mobile world, ramped up security is a constant companion to the newer technologies and business approaches they enable. So it was good to meet with UK-based MooD International recently to discuss its approach to cyber security and the challenge of business decision making in a constantly changing environment.
Two things struck us about its approach. Firstly, rather than focussing on protecting the end point (which can never be 100% secure), MooD is all about forward thinking, threat awareness and enabling organisations to be prepared. Secondly, that the arms race between attackers and defenders means constant change, so decision support systems must be readily adaptable and MooD’s model-based approach (i.e. no coding) and business-oriented visualisations enable that.
However, the concepts are applicable across the enterprise so the broader value proposition ties to business agility and higher quality decision making, leading to better business performance. MooD is all about understanding the elements of a business (e.g. data - whether big data or just the right data, systems, people, processes, services and structure, and their inter-relationships), building an operational model, and presenting the results in the form of visualisations. The aim is to enable more informed, transparent investment and decision making because the process can be used to identify areas of vulnerability, or explore the potential impact of a decision. The company offers the performance management technology platform on which solutions can be built, and provides three of its own pre-built solutions – Security, Outsourcing and Capability Performance Management – as a platform can be hard to grasp in the abstract.
The company has wrung the changes over recent years (see Salamander gets in the MooD). As a two-time winner of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise and Innovation (among other accolades) this SME has certainly garnered attention. MooD is growing at around 30% p.a., with an operating profit of around 20%. Its challenge is to stimulate further growth which means tackling two major issues – bringing further clarity to the value proposition, and building relationships with key SI’s. In the private sector we can see the MooD platform being a good companion product for SI’s building process- or industry-specific solutions e.g. around their cloud-based platforms, or it could lessen potential competitive issues among partners with a more vertical go-to-market strategy. There is also potential if the platform can gain direct ‘cross government’ acceptance rather than being tied to a specific SI-led bid. We’ll monitor its progress with interest.
