In 2019, Mobile Mentor founder and CEO Denis O’Shea decided it was time to pivot his company’s focus from software development to web security.
Nine months later, security was suddenly a top concern of nearly every industry in Nashville.
“When Covid happened, people were relegated to working from home, sometimes on a shared family computer or iPad and on personal laptops and personal tablets and phones,” O’Shea said. “So the demand for the kind of work we do has been growing.”
So much so, Mobile Mentor doubled its revenue last year, O’Shea said, and the company is looking to do the same in 2021.
Mobile Mentor opened it Nashville office in Nov. 2017 with an eye on developing, securing and managing mobile applications, primarily for the health care industry. The company is headquartered in New Zealand and has been providing web security services there and in Australia for many years.
O’Shea said he decided to switch Mobile Mentor’s U.S. focus to security because of the growing need in the market, as well as issues the company had finding software development talent. The company is now servicing the health care, education and government industries.
“We had a real nightmare trying to get quality developers. It was a real battle,” O’Shea said. “We weren’t seeing a long-term growth path for that development business. It was an unpredictable, difficult business. Whereas we could see the need for security was growing, and the rate of growth was accelerating. All the terrible stuff we’re seeing today around cyberattacks and ransomware … we’ve been in the security business a long time so we could see signs that it was getting worse.”
Toward that end, Mobile Mentor began working with Microsoft to implement their products for customers. The relationship has worked so well, O’Shea said, that Mobile Mentor was named Microsoft’s 2021 Global Partner of the Year Award for Modern Endpoint Management.
O’Shea said the company plans to capitalize on that relationship to do research around the state of security in the health care industry, using Microsoft data to which Mobile Mentor would otherwise not have access.
Mobile Mentor currently employees 70 people, 15 of whom are in Nashville. O’Shea said the company currently has 10 open positions, with five new employees expected to join the Nashville office in August.
While hiring has been slowed by the pandemic, O’Shea said he still expects to reach a local employee headcount of 110 over the next three years, which was announced in 2018 in conjunction with the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.
“We’re aiming to double [our business] in the year ahead,” O’Shea said. “We weren’t aiming to grow that fast but the [Microsoft] partner of the year gives us a one-shot opportunity to really go hard. As my wife keeps reminding me, we could be old news next year. So we’re going to go really hard and make a big investment this year.”
