When Patrick Evans left Symantec in 2011 after 17 years, he took a few months off to recharge his batteries. This erstwhile entrepreneur, who had launched his first business at 21, had also commercialised and introduced Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to the local market in 1991, through his company Foster-Melliar, which was acquired by Symantec in 2001.

He needed some time to reflect and think about where to apply his know-how next. The tablet had been launched, smartphones had been around for a while, and Apple was rocking. “My interests had turned to the convergence of four megatrends: social, mobile, cloud and big data, which were all the analysts were talking about,” Evans says. “I knew that my back ground in security would pay off. To make all these different technologies come together would require people who could see security not as a standalone element, but as an integral part of every technology solution.”