Talking LastPass and IoT With LogMeIn India Managing Director Rahul Sharma

What's common between a password manager, the Internet of Things (IoT), and remote access tools for customer support? Well, for one thing, there all products offered by LogMeIn, which makes enterprise tools, and also consumer products such as password manager LastPass. But as LogMeIn India Managing Director Rahul Sharma explains, the trio are also methods of authenticating identity.

"We live in a multi-device world, where people are using their own phones and laptops to connect to their offices and working, and we need systems to manage all of this," says Sharma. "To make sure that whether it's the individual, or the device, everyone is connected in a way they're supposed to be, and this becomes even more complicated today thanks to the proliferation of IoT."

LogMeIn has an office in Bengaluru, one of only nine offices around the world, and its only office in India. The company has a business team here, though it started out as a support office.

"Like many other global vendors, we came to India to support our customers. We were working with HP, Microsoft, Intel, and others, and used that as a base to grow, to engage with technology companies," he says. "Today, we're working with even SMB companies, and are trying to help people to build a digital model of business. So for example, we have a tool called BoldChat that can help you to do customer support."

Keeping passwords secure
Passwords that are easily guessed or reusing the same password across various services leaves you vulnerable to attacks. But coming up with good passwords for a dozen different accounts can be a challenge for consumers, and LogMeIn's LastPass is one of the popular solutions to this problem. "Consumer are not only getting much more aware, and with our free tier we give them a great stepping stone to start using the software," says Sharma. "We also have a lot of enterprise clients."

LogMeIn's acquisition of LastPass a little over a year ago gave it an entry into the consumer space, and according to Sharma, the recent move to allow password sync across devices as a part of the free package has made it hugely popular.

"We were seeing around 4,000 to 4,500 new users [worldwide] every week," he says, "but ever since we added multi-device [in November] that number has been around 20,000 and it's not gone down since."

"We're now looking at new things like proximity-based logins. Companies like Apple offer similar features, but the advantage of working with us is that we are interoperable between devices," Sharma adds. "You can't tell someone that you have to buy a particular phone or computer. If a customer has a Dell laptop, you can't tell him, 'you can't get an iPhone'."

The Internet of Things
Right now though, he's most bullish about the potential for IoT solutions in India. "We are a leap market, which has shown a lot of enthusiasm for adoption of technology," Sharma says. "IoT is now, what the Internet was 10 years ago. It's got the potential to revolutionise everything but the framework is still being laid down. In India, we have a real opportunity, with a young workforce of digital natives, and Digital India which was a very important signal from the government, and is changing how everyone approaches technology."

Coming back to the topics of IoT, Sharma says that LogMeIn works with any company that's working on a connected app. "Mahindra is using 247 sensors in the E2O, Honda is supporting IoT via an app, our technology helps automate all kinds of communications," he explains. This, Sharma says, applies to a number of a different ways that are beyond what might be seen as traditional IoT communication.

"First there's person to person. This is collaboration, identity, and support," he explains. "Then there's another kind of communication which has become much more important, that is machine to machine communication. Sensors, and any number of devices need to communicate information to each other to power most of the things we take for granted." So we have a platform called Xively, that provides a platform for IoT communications, and allows your business logic to be coded into the communication."

With IoT continuing to drive growth and creating new use cases that most of us probably haven’t even imagined yet, Sharma believes that LogMeIn is ready for a big 2017.