Telefonica Digital has single-handedly changed its parent’s image as a slow-moving telco giant and become the engine for a genuinely innovative approach to the mobile web. Its latest effort is in digital security, where it claims to be ‘radically changing the way products are developed in this area’ with a new unit called Eleven Paths.
The UK-based Digital arm has a broad remit covering many new business models and applications, which could run into conflicts of interest if left within the main body of the company. These include over-the-top applications, new devices, mobile payments, emerging services like machine-to-machine, and investments in promising start-ups.
Eleven Paths is a partnership with Spanish security consultancy Informatica 64, whose CEO Chema Alonso will head the initiative as an autonomous business unit within Telefonica Digital, driving ‘radical innovation’ in security and boasting the ‘flexibility of a start-up to allow fast and innovative product development’. Telefonica calls this approach ‘hothousing’.
One of the first Eleven Paths products will be a penetration testing tool, for simulating attacks on companies’ systems in order to find weaknesses. This will be based on an existing Informatica 64 product, FOCA.
Alonso said in a statement: ‘We want to radically change the way companies provide security services to customers and big corporations. The digital world is changing the rules and security services need to adapt to this new challenge very fast.’ Particular areas of focus will be security for BYOD (bring your own device) enterprises and for digital video, fraud prevention, and personal data privacy. Telefonica Digital CEO Matthew Key said Alonso and his team were ‘world leaders in information security who bring the necessary skills in this area to reflect the nature of the market and bring the right solutions to our customers’.