Cipafilter

Based in East Moline, IL, Cipafilter offers web filtering for schools to keep students safe online.

Products Offered:
2 main products:
1- Web filter
2- Firewall

web filter and firewall- sold as a single suite package where you get everything in one. But they’ve split it out into a next gen firewall package and web filter
- Split between 2 packages
- Still offer the original suite package

Main Things They Do:
- Content filtering
- App control
- Bandwidth control
- Insight reports
- Really good support
- Ssl decryption is a huge thing that people are either running from it or running into it. A lot of schools have had a bad taste in their mouth so they want it, but don’t want to deal with it. (they’d rather have unsafe internet rather than no internet) but this company says they have an amazing product and solution that’s different and they need to trust them that they’re better than them. They’re relatively small company


Entering into E-Rate season (spring time) where the schools are ready to buy firewalls and get funding for that right now
- 3 different sized units
- Same software/product just different sizing for the district that you’re selling to
- School budgets come due in July
- E-rate season: starting in January, schools can start putting out bids for E-rate which is federal funding for all of their technology except for filtering
- To get E-rate, you need web filter, however E-rate does not cover filter, it only covers firewall
- Web filter only products aren’t e-rateable
- Cipafilter can be covered by E-Rate, saving their customers a lot of money
- July is when they actually pay for the products and receive their e-rate funding

Tech support that comes with the product
- Some of the best support in industry, 90 percent answer rate with US based support team and always a human answering the problems

Reporting

Configuration cloud backup- store people’s configurations in the cloud. If units go down, then their configuration isn’t lost
Partner Portal for people managing multiple units
- They can manage their inventory. If someone’s working with a service center and have 30 schools they can see the health of the 30 schools

What are some adjectives your best customers would use to describe your company?
A: Describing the support team: fast, friendly, knowledgeable
Product: reporting = easy to use, useable (actually gives readable, actionable reports that are easy to understand)
Contact sensitive filter that, because it works so well, people don’t know that it is working and may not value it as much, it’s behind the scenes and not top of mind for customers, even though it is a core part of their product
- Hard time selling that because the filtering industry has been commoditized and it sounds generic to customers

On the more pricey side, but they offer more services that are included