Ottawa’s Tehama Technologies, which has was recently restructured under the leadership of multiple senior executives from the company, sees the new partnership with Microsoft as critical in the evolution of their strategy going forward.
Mick Miralis, CRO at Tehama Technologies
Ottawa-based Tehama Technologies, which makes a cybersecurity platform that provides secure access to data and applications by hybrid and remote workers, has announced that it has been accepted into Microsoft’s Startups Pegasus Program. Tehama sees it as a significant spur to their sales, particularly through Microsoft Virtual Desktop.
Tehama’s plan here is part of an aggressive reworking to bring the company back to profitability. The original company, Tehama Inc., was a business unit of global IT product and services company Pythian that focused on enterprise Desktop as a Service [DaaS], and was spun out into a separate company in 2019. They ran into difficulties, however, part of which were caused by their financing. Tehama went bankrupt in 2023, but was purchased out of bankruptcy by multiple past senior executives with the company, and was rebranded as Tehama Technologies.
They do pretty much the same thing they did before, although changes in the market resulted in a different message to that market.
“Our primary mission is to provide secure access for data and applications for enterprise through our fully integrated and automated platform,” said Mick Miralis, CRO at Tehama Technologies, who like the other senior members of the reborn Tehama, was originally at Tehama Inc. “Our strategy is to provide a complementary virtual desktop as part of the platform, which reflects the fact that the virtual desktop space is increasingly becoming a commodity. The virtual desktop enables the customer to have a full suite and remove the complexity that comes from the need to integrate 25 or so technologies. We do away with all that by building it into our platform.”
The focus is now on the platform, not on DaaS.
“Our roots are in SMB and we have many customers there, but we are touching the enterprise as well,” Miralis said. “But just defining it was DaaS is now too narrow. The desktop is now too important.”
Membership in the invite-only Pegasus program strengthens Tehama further by blending Microsoft’s cloud-delivered solutions with Tehama’s disruptive cybersecurity platform to support hybrid or remote work.
“Being invited to join Pegasus allows us to be really focused on our cybersecurity,” Miralis stated. “Our strategy is to be able to provide a complementary VDI as part of Pegasus. We want to make it available in Azure Virtual Desktop – and incorporate it as an option for those who may not want to use our own complementary product. It also expands what we want to do globally around multi-cloud.”
Miralis also noted that Microsoft approached Tehama about becoming part of Pegasus, and not the reverse.
“They reached out to us,” he said. “Security is obviously a hot topic, and there is an evolving consensus about what is happening in the VDI space. They were not looking for best of breed, but for an integrated platform play.”
Through the Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub, Tehama can also collaborate closer with industry experts and engage with Microsoft sales teams and partners to accelerate Tehama’s global go-to-market expansion.
“We are developing a lot of content to activate and accelerate our partners,” Miralis said. “We are working with them at engineering, marketing and customer success levels, and we also integrate our team into the partners’ team, when they want that.
“Our platform is designed from the bottom-up to integrate third party platforms, and the expectation is that we will create value around Azure Virtual Desktop, Miralis continued. “It was a no-brainer that we should be working with Microsoft. With Pegasus, we are now aligned around the industry’s technology leader – and their marketplace – so there are a lot of opportunities, and we will be looking to integrate partners. We are already working with a UK partner who has a tool that validates credentials. There is a lot of opportunity for partners to integrate with us, accelerating our global expansion, and creating much greater value for our partners who are 100% of our market. The majority of our existing customers and partners are in North America, but we are accelerating in South Africa and are having discussions in the mid-east.”
Miralis also noted that Darrin Leboeuf, based in Ottawa, has joined Tehama as Director, Secure Virtual Workforce Solutions as of January 1, and is now the de facto Canadian country manager.
