by Michel Klompmaker
We recently spoke in the Amsterdam office of Nixu Corporation with the new CEO Teemu Salmi, also a Nasdaq Helsinki-listed international player in the field of cybersecurity. Nixu is a household name and absolute market leader in the mother country of Finland and now desires to grow further, including in the Benelux. Firstly, let’s provide some background on Nixu and its new CEO. Nixu is not a software supplier, but a cybersecurity services company with the mission to protect businesses against cyber attacks, so that business continuity is and remains assured.
Nixu’s passion is to keep the digital society going, offering practical solutions to ensure business continuity along with easy access to digital services and data protection. Since 2015, Nixu has also been based in the Netherlands and works closely with CyberVeilig Nederland and of course with the Finnish Dutch Chamber of Commerce.
Nixu also works with a number of strategic technology partners, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Forgerock, Gluu, IBM, Microsoft, Saviynt and Delina (formerly Thycotic). The company is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, with offices in Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Romania. It employs a total of 400 cybersecurity professionals, about 250 of whom work in Finland, from which the European entities are managed. The company’s market capitalisation is currently around EUR 45 million. The company had a typical ‘growth history’ in the early years, from start-up to scale-up, with the definitive choice being made in 2012 to focus entirely on cyber security as a one hundred percent ‘service company’.
Teemu Salmi has been appointed to further streamline the business activities in the coming years, whereby the different countries will have to take advantage of the successes of the other countries, to take the whole to an even higher level. Nixu currently works for more than 650 Business to Business companies.
Research firm Gartner recently predicted that this year the growth of cybersecurity services companies will be one percent, but next year, according to Gartner forecasters, it will be a whopping 13 percent. As for the CEO himself, he has set himself the goal of developing Nixu into a mature company, without islands in his own organisation. He has nearly 30 years of experience in the IT, telecom and forestry industry in Scandinavia and beyond in his career preceding Nixu. Two years ago, in 2020, Teemu Salmi in Finland received the CIO of the Year award for his achievements.
We spoke with Teemu about the current cyber risks and Nixu’s role in this regard. He emphasised again that it is essentially about the control of digital assets, where Nixu deliberately takes a neutral position in with regard to external software suppliers, in order to ensure the best solution as a service provider together with the customer. In other words, close to the customer on the basis of a subscription, or as it is so beautifully described in English with ‘continuous service agreement’, and can be used on a project basis where necessary. Most of the know-how and experience is in Finland, but it can be used anywhere for all customers, with local support.
Teemu admitted that the activities of “inside hackers” are a serious problem, but that they have developed methods to counter it. In addition, there are the more or less ‘normal cyber security risks’ that well-meaning employees entail. Awareness and direct confrontation with the possible consequences of negligence are especially important here.
The new CEO with Swedish nationality, as our conversation showed, is fully confident that the Finnish Nixu will be accelerated on the European map. In Finland it has been the undisputed number one. A new Nokia in the making? We’re going to follow it.
