Netsweeper stands as a beacon in the realm of cybersecurity and content filtering, celebrating a 25-year legacy of technological innovation and global impact. The company emerged with a mission to create cutting-edge solutions that safeguard the digital landscape. Over the years, Netsweeper has not only met but exceeded its goals, leaving an indelible mark on the industry. Known for its robust content filtering tools, Netsweeper has been at the forefront of enabling organizations to navigate the complex challenges of the digital age, ensuring a secure and controlled online environment. With a commitment to excellence and adaptability, Netsweeper has expanded its influence across borders, providing cybersecurity solutions that resonate with clients worldwide.
On our most recent episode of Inside the Sweeps, we are joined by the visionary founders and owners of Netsweeper, Perry Roach and Lou Erdelyi, who will take us on a journey through the company’s inception, share insights into their monumental achievements, and provide a glimpse into the strategies that propelled Netsweeper to become a global leader in the cybersecurity domain. Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Netsweeper’s success and explore the lessons learned over a quarter-century of innovation and adaptability.
John Robb
On our most recent episode of Inside the Sweeps, we are joined by the visionary founders and owners of Netsweeper, Perry Roach and Lou Erdelyi, who will take us on a journey through the company’s inception, share insights into their achievements, and provide a glimpse into the strategies that propelled Netsweeper to become a global leader in digital safety.
Join us as we uncover the secrets behind Netsweeper success and explore the lessons learned over 1/4 century of innovation and adaptability.
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us on our podcast Inside the Sweeps.
Today we’re joined by Netsweeper’s visionary founders and owners Perry Roach and Lou Erdelyi. Gentlemen, please introduce yourself to our listeners and take us back to those early days of Netsweeper. What inspired you to start this venture and what were the initial goals you set up for the company?
Perry Roach
Hey, John, it’s Perry Roach, co-founder and CEO of Netsweeper. Thanks for the intro.
It’s interesting to recall over 25 years ago the internet was in its infancy. Porn was a major contributor and Lou and I saw this as a challenge.
I recently had a customer say to me, you know, we agree that from the beginning, the first days of the internet content was going be a challenge and it absolutely is about content.
It’s about the World Wide Web. Each country has its own challenges, from culture, laws, and other ways of viewing. You know, most other companies went down the path of networking, security, we needed those companies. They needed to build the highways, but Lou and I always knew that it was the content on the internet that was going be the major focus.
Lou Erdelyi
Hi everyone. M name is Lou Erdelyi. I’m a co-founder and CTO of Netsweeper and as Perry said, we saw the need to protect users and children online because there was no good solution for that.
We had a desire to change how the internet was going to be used one day, and we all know that the internet has no boundaries, so that was one of the key moments that we had in Netsweeper.
John Robb
I’m sure there’s a lot more to this story that we’re going to get. So, from our humble beginnings to becoming a global leader, Netsweeper has undoubtedly left an indelible mark on the tech landscape. As we celebrate 25 years in business, Perry, what do you think is the most significant milestones and achievements in our history? Lou, are there any key turning points in our journey that you’d like to tell people about?
Lou Erdelyi
Absolutely, John. One of the key points I believe that Netsweeper had and why it has been successful for the past 25 years is that we’ve been cloud focused, cloud centric, very early on. When the first countrywide telecom decided to use Netsweeper, we were able to help enforce their legal obligations at a much, much larger scale.
Perry Roach
There‘s a lot of history and milestones over a 25-year period, but let’s start at the very beginning.
The very first customer had a major challenge with their patrons at a library viewing inappropriate material, and it just wasn’t suitable for the environment, and we were chosen to come in and fix that problem.
The outcome of what we did was a safe place to be at the library, a bunch of our customers, like ISPs and schools, are asked to manage the entire worlds internet. They have to build towers; they have to manage and teach children. And then, because of a government legislation, they have to go out and figure out how to manage the entire world’s content in the day for a bunch of crafty kids. So, we think a big a big turning point is when they contact us, or we contact them and show them and help them on how to achieve their goals.
Another big milestone that’s near and dear to our heart is the student protection and now the next generation of safety solutions, and we’re delighted to see students getting assistance that they require and deserve, sometimes in very urgent suicidal type situations. And another big milestone recently is one of our largest countrywide customers was able to get a social media company to cough up $886 million by enforcing one of their laws using Netsweeper’s law enforcement solution.
So we’re delighted to continue to help out our customers.
John Robb
Thanks guys for mentioning that the internet has changed radically over the 25 years.
Things change, innovations come, disruptions come, everything changes the fabric of what it is that we do online.
Lou, what kind of things has Netsweeper done to contribute to that evolution over the past 25 years? Is there anything specific that jumps out to you that you would want to mention?
Lou Erdelyi
There’s probably tons of things that Netsweeper has done, but I think some of the key points is that Netsweeper introduced the concept of multi-tenant administration, manageable from anywhere using a web browser.
Most of the technologies that were employed in the 90’s were specifically client-based administration systems with limited capabilities. So, we introduced the concept; manage from anywhere using a web browser.
Another one would be the concept of filtering as a service. We believe that we are a service-oriented organization. Things that we do for our customers are attributed to our technology and they’re using it as a service.
We also introduced the whole concept 25 years ago of AI, which allows us to be able to scale and categorize as the internet grows because most other organizations way back when, were mostly focused on an allow or deny list which was manually collated by individuals. But we realized that that will not scale. The other thing is that because we’ve been AI for 25 years, it allows us to be future proof in all the solutions that we are offering, and it allows us to be able to deliver tailored services specifically that match our customers’ needs.
John Robb
The scale of the internet Perry had mentioned the worldwide internet and being able to accommodate the whole world and how you manage that is a bit of a daunting task. I’m sure you’ve had some challenges along the way associated with that and now Perry mentioned the digital safety, how that’s coming into the fore.
Perry, Lou, have you got any insight maybe that would be helpful to people listening about how those experiences that we’ve had over 25 years shaped some of our strategies to be resilient and adaptable in this complex internet environment.
Perry Roach
The internet continually changes and grows. The biggest challenge is just the simple growth. We’re finding over 50 million new websites every day and all kinds of content, so the growth of the internet, the scale of the internet, these highways, these towers, these networks that our internet service providers have built, are able to carry tons and tons and trillions and trillions of requests we see.
We see our competitors, getting out of the network side of things, going down to a client, we’re also in a client. Managing these trillions of requests centrally is a huge challenge.
Another big challenge that’s happened over the last 25 years is encryption. When the internet started, it wasn’t encrypted. Today, the majority of the Internet content is encrypted.
On another note, Netsweeper actually assists in many verticals. Anybody that has and uses the internet is a customer at Netsweeper. Vertical markets, any type of usage of the internet, we get involved in.
Lou Erdelyi
Netsweeper needs to always innovate when it comes to the ever-changing internet landscapes. As more and more particular protocols come online, the internet is no longer composed of HTTP. It’s a complex system of various applications that are either interconnected or working together.
We also, of course, are always innovating when it comes to our technologies in this particular space. That is one of the reasons why we have a relatively strong patent portfolio, and that is one way we show our leadership in this particular space.
John Robb
Perry, you mentioned earlier that anybody that uses the internet is a potential customer for Netsweeper. The solution crosses various sectors: education, telecom, even countrywide.
Over time, how have you seen the need to safeguard these environments change from where it started? So, Perry, maybe you could just answer this one for us, what have you seen as being that change on the filtering and content categorization side?
Perry Roach
Well, as we know the internet changes and the issues have expanded way beyond the initial internet porn content, which scared everybody. The most recent thing that we should mention is with AI hitting all aspects of the internet, online scams are affecting companies, citizens and creating billions of dollars of losses, lots of heartache and many, many more challenges to come.
With Netsweeper’s assistance, the internet is no longer as lawless of an environment as it once was. There is a growing push to apply offline laws on to the online world and to deal with issues like fraud and child exploitation, criminal acts, and financial crimes.
But I want to point out one real interesting 25-year trend in change. 30 years ago, 20 years ago, the entire world’s economy was driven, as we know it, in a bricks and mortar go and visit stores and so on. And think about this, almost everything we touch is online today. Everything goes across the internet.
Let’s think about this. Our entire financial economy and existence is shifting away from the traditional models over the internet transactions and internet purchases and goods and services are taking over. This is very, very important to get this right, and there’s a lot at stake. And as we know over time, the internet swings back and forth, from good to bad and bad to good, and the advantages and the internet scale and some of these AI technologies, deep fakes, what can we really believe that’s going on the internet? So Netsweeper has taken a stance to make the Internet a better place for our customers.
Lou Erdelyi
Netsweeper started out as a pure web filtering company. That’s how we originally started 25 years ago, but we have since added a lot of functionality to our product offerings or services. For example, like alerting educators to any online issues affecting their end users and that could be staff or possibly students, right.
Netsweeper has partnered and will continue as always partner with other organizations that are like minded and that believe in social responsibility.
John Robb
Lou, you mentioned social responsibility, and I can imagine over 25 years dealing with the type of content that Netsweeper deals with, you’ve seen the kind of societal impact that happens when these bad actors get to take advantage of the internet. I suspect you have worked with a number of partners over the years that are interested in societal responsibility like the IWF, C3P and a number of other organizations.
Perry, can you give us a little insight into how those partnerships help underscore what it is that Netsweeper is doing and what we’re looking to do in the future?
Perry Roach
It’s pretty hard to sit back over 25 years, see everything that’s going on the internet and not want to make changes. So Netsweeper’s made a tremendous commitment both financially and technologically, to battle the social issue of child sexual abuse and human trafficking.
One of our customers from an environmental side, won an award reducing the number of servers, power, racking and other, you know, environmental challenging situations that this industry has occurred all by adopting Netsweeper’s virtualization and continual improvement of efficiency of our servers.
And we took a real good understanding early on that this child sexual abuse material is the absolute worst situation on the internet. And we made this major commitment with governments and partners by actually finding and alerting immediately any suspected child exploitation sites. Handing those over to the authorities and doing what we do best in real time, managing this internet, especially the good stuff and the bad stuff.
Lou Erdelyi
And Netsweeper has believed right from day one that everything is finite. And what that means is that we know that you know, resources, are not readily available at times. And that is one of the reasons why from the get-go, we decided to be a multi-tenant, multi-user environment, using always the latest technologies. And that allowed us to reduce the server footprint, it allowed us to reduce energy costs, space requirements, cooling, power, all the way down the production line by utilizing less and gaining more out of it.
John Robb
Speaking of gaining more Perry, as the CEO, you certainly appreciate the impact that your team has on your success. How do you go about attracting and nurturing talent and what kind of role has this played in your company’s achievements?
Perry Roach
Well, people make the difference, John. And we have a lot of bright people at Netsweeper, and what I realized early on that bright people want a very challenging environment and managing the entire world’s internet every second of every day is probably one of the most challenging things, which is why we focus on this.
On another note, Netsweeper offers a social responsibility side to our daily work.
It’s nice to know that we’re saving lives, helping early mental health detection to children. We do good work, and our team knows they’re helping every day.
John Robb
I know that when I come to work every day, it’s definitely encouraging to know that we are helping keep the internet safer for people that are looking to use the internet, and I certainly appreciate that. Behind every technological advancement, there’s a narrative of positive transformation, and Netsweeper is no exception to that.
Lou, is there a particular customer success story or implementation that stands out to you? And Perry, maybe you can elaborate on Netsweeper has had a positive influence on the organizations that we serve.
Lou Erdelyi
Well, John, where to begin? There is a lots of memorable implementations where our system is being used, but top of my head I would probably say that, the one that stands out, probably the most, was the implementation of the Netsweeper solution in libraries, in some of the libraries, at least in Canada, and it involved the need to balance the safety of the staff while also protecting children.
Perry Roach
As Lou mentioned, there’s a ton of great implementations, but the regulators of each country and the internet itself are absolutely now realizing it’s time to make the internet a safer place. And they just simply need to modernize their countries digital ecosystem and enforce the laws according to their cultures.
The future of their economy depends on managing the flow of commerce, content, and simply taking the same laws that we live with every day and applying these to the internet with Netsweeper as their enforcement.
With encryption, lack of transparency, flow of transactions outside of legal jurisdiction, it’s just no longer can they accept self-assessment and using Netsweeper to identify the ultimate business owners on the internet and how that affects their country is a huge challenge today. We see that as our current and future implementation and what we’re also seeing is regulators are wondering where the money went. They’re focused on tax leakage, they’re looking for a way to improve their economy, and our software makes it easy them for them to achieve that.
And the bottom line is as a success criterion rather than an implementation example, would be how we introduce zero-latency and zero risk of taking our internet service providers networks down. This is very important to the implementation of Netsweeper.
John Robb
Now that you’ve had 25 years along this journey, where do you see your next phase taking you as part of your company’s vision, or the kind of impact you want to have in the industry, or the type of customers you’re looking to service in the future?
Perry Roach
Well, there’s a lot of things we want to take forward, but improving the educational experience with better tools, better environment, our next generation school safety tools will keep the kids safe, keep them away from harmful content and the bad actors. I mean, us adults, we created this environment, right. So, we have to provide these tools to these children. It’s our duty of care.
With AI, we have to fight AI with AI, so a lot of these scams for example are using AI, and we have AI, and fight equally back. If we don’t give regulators tools so they can enforce the rules on the internet, the internet is going to be an even more challenging place. Where the heck is it going to go? And enabling the internet service providers to gain further access to digital advertising revenues is a vision for the future of Netsweeper and absolutely required for our Internet service providers to find non connectivity revenue.
Lou Erdelyi
Well as far as future goals are concerned, there John. You know, we’re looking at introducing the next generation of student and mental health alerting to ensure that we look beyond the current issues that exist.
We want to make sure that we continue to protect the vulnerable at all stages of their development.
John Robb
It sounds like there are some interesting things on the horizon relative to advertising and fighting scams and protecting children with some early mental health detection. These all sound positive and encouraging.
Is there anything that either of you would like to say to wrap up our conversation here today?
Perry Roach
Thanks, John. I mean, you know the internet will continue to penetrate our daily lives and society, and it’s important to really understand where we’re going. We must ask ourselves whether the future that is being sold to us on the Internet has our best interest in mind.
Think about AI and the way it’s changing the internet every minute as we speak. What will be true? What will be believable? It’s Netsweeper’s goal to make the internet the best place for you to be in your daily lives. And we want to ensure that we address the content on the internet now and in the future.
Lou Erdelyi
Yeah. And speaking of AI and content, we all know that, as Perry mentioned, more and more content is being created. But with AI, it’s even accelerating even further. And what that means is that, you know, Netsweeper will be there to help manage the content and allow customers and partners to utilize the internet for what it was meant to be, which is gathering all of humanities information, right? And have it accessible, right, without having to wait through either disturbing or hateful references or, you know, inappropriate content.
Perry Roach
As the internet gets more and more dynamic. Netsweeper will continue to develop and deliver these powerful tools to protect everyone from the harms of the internet and the legal ways of the internet.
John Robb
Thank you very much gentlemen. I really appreciate your time today. This has been a quite insightful in terms of how Netsweeper has gone about doing its business over the last 25 years and we look forward to the next 25 years.
Thanks again.
Lou Erdelyi
Thank you, John. It’s been a pleasure.
Perry Roach
Pleasure John.