DINAcon Awards Nominee

Wire

Project Category: #1 Best Open Source Project

https://github.com/wireapp

Leila Iranmanesh

The Wire Story

Wire is on a mission to revolutionise how we communicate and collaborate at work. It has built the most secure collaboration platform for business and wants to democratise the nascent area of secure collaboration.
Wire was set up in 2012 by a team of former Skype technologists, including Skype’s co-founder, Janus Friis, and security experts Alan Duric and Raphael Robert.
At Skype these individuals transformed the way organisations around the world connected and communicated. Their starting point for Wire was a question: ‘What kind of platform would we create now, if we were doing it all again?’
They landed on four key values that continue to drive Wire to this day: security, privacy, transparency and user experience. When Wire launched publicly in 2016 after years of investment and development, end-to-end encryption was at the heart of its platform, but at the time data privacy was less of an issue than it is now. Some tech giants were even saying that privacy was dead, which shocked and concerned Wire’s founders. In 2017 the management team was strengthened with former Huddle CEO Morten Brþgger joining as CEO, along with Rasmus Holst’s appointment as Chief Revenue Officer, working alongside founding team member Alan Duric, CTO/COO.
The management team identified how a number of drivers, including increased cyber threats and changes to the world of work, meant secure collaboration for business would be one of the fastest growing areas of enterprise technology.
The team knew that the four pillars upon which Wire is built - security, privacy, transparency and user experience - were exactly what the enterprise market required. In response, Wire launched two products for the enterprise market both of which are uniquely available in both cloud and on-premise versions. First Wire Red, a secure collaboration platform designed for deployment after an attack, that allows businesses to continue to communicate and collaborate securely when their network is compromised or unavailable. Second, Wire Pro, a collaboration platform for a businesses entire communication and collaboration needs, that ensures complete privacy and security.

Since launching its enterprise offering in early 2018, Wire has built tremendous momentum:

    Landing over 550 enterprise customers, including EY, Blackrock, Softbank Robotics, PFA Pension Fund and Unicef
  • Experiencing 23x YoY revenue growth
  • Becoming the only cloud platform recognised across Forrester’s New Wave secure collaboration and Gartner’s Workstream Collaboration; and recognised by IDC as the only vendor to offer public independent security audits.

Though the company has come a long way, its principles remain unchanged. Business collaboration should prioritise security, privacy, transparency and user experience.
The majority of existing business collaboration technology is dysfunctional, insecure and clunky. In short, it is unfit for today’s world. It heightens rather than tackles security risks; impedes productivity; and is unnecessarily expensive to operate. Email systems are easily hacked and companies spend a large portion of their IT budgets managing this risk. Inboxes are also stuffed with spam inhibiting productivity. In an effort to compensate for the limits of email, businesses are paying for multiple collaboration tools, all of which are not as secure or as efficient as customers need them to be. Wire is on a mission to change this. Wire addresses these problems by enabling users to communicate and collaborate through message, voice, video, file sharing and search all in one private and secure platform.
All content (voice and video calls, texts, pictures, graphics) that is sent using Wire’s platform is protected using “end to end” encryption. Other communication platforms, such as Workplace by Facebook, Slack and WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams or Telegram, only encrypt the message for parts of its journey.
In the coming months you can expect to hear a lot from Wire as it continues on its mission to bring the benefits of secure communication and collaboration to large enterprise. Right now, Wire is working collaboratively with other leaders to develop a common global security standard for secure collaboration technologies, so that users are able to operate between different messaging platforms with the same level of privacy and security that exists in Wire. Wire’s CTO, Alan Durich, the brains behind Web RTC (on which over 7bn devices now operate), is leading this work. The group is developing ​Message Layer Security​ (MLS), a new interoperable standard for maintaining security and privacy between messaging platforms.
There is a long way to go to ensure that the world’s organisations achieve all the benefits of secure collaboration, but as more and more organisations wake up to the growing business, operational and reputational risks associated with cyberattacks, low productivity and insecure communication, Wire is uniquely well-placed to help.

 

Why should this Project win a DINAcon Award?

Wire is the first Open Source project that competes on equal terms with Slack and Microsoft Teams - with the approach to security that: Open Source Public Audit End to End Encryption sums up to make the most secure, transparent and user friendly collaboration tool