Dallas-based Jericho Systems gives out t-shirts that say, “We Protect Your Private Parts.” It’s a cheeky nod to the business the company is in: security, privacy, and personalization. It’s the digital future Jericho CEO Brynn Mow saw in 2002. And now the SMU graduate sees another—one that can help small business break free from the pack.
After selling off her second technology startup, Dallas Technology Group, Mow recognized in the early days after 9/11 that the United States had a problem sharing information with the right people in real time. Conversely, the government couldn’t stop an already open flow of information in real time, either.
Jericho’s EnterSpace software, the first commercially available, “attribute”-based access control technology, profiled people and situations, and determined access based on that profiling (although Mow was careful to not use the word “profile” back then because it wasn’t “politically correct,” she says).
Government agencies like the Department of Defense needed EnterSpace, but Mow had to help them understand why. She and her team at Jericho spent years educating and developing standards, and defining “how large enterprises or anyone in the digital world talks to each other.” Then came the processing of “big data,” the mass quantities of digital information we now have the technological capacity to store and, to some degree, make sense of, Mow says. Jericho’s various services and products help keep big data secure, a must for government entities and businesses alike.
The company, which employs 25, has about a dozen clients, including tactical, intelligence, and health divisions of the various branches of the military, as well as private-sector clients in health and human services. According to Mow, healthcare is a big challenge, but a big opportunity. That’s where Jericho’s next efforts will be focused, with the eventual vision of allowing patients total control of their own medical data to share or deny access.
But any small business can benefit from the same information gathering and processing technology, focusing on personalization, Mow says.
“I don’t want ads for oil changes, I want ads for Jimmy Choo shoes on sale at Neiman’s,” Mow says. If you can take the data and utilize it for whatever your small business needs-—provided it’s used correctly—it can become a powerful weapon, she says.
