From Red Ocean to Blue Ocean: How OneLayer Found Its Sweet Spot in Enterprise Security

The conventional wisdom about market selection presents a stark choice: enter established markets with better solutions or pioneer entirely new categories. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, OneLayer founder Dave Mor revealed a more nuanced approach—one that challenges this binary thinking and offers valuable lessons for B2B tech founders.

The Military Intelligence Perspective

Dave’s approach to market selection was shaped by his observations of different patterns among Israeli military intelligence veterans: “If you are looking about the ex military guys, you have actually here several units. And there are guys that come in for one of the units that looking for the most red ocean and are sure that they can build the best product. And there are guys that coming from a different unit, they’re looking for the most blue ocean that can have a huge challenge to overcome.”

Finding the Middle Ground

Rather than choosing either extreme, Dave developed a framework for identifying opportunities in the space between: “I look for a new technology that is growing very fast. There is no engineering barriers for the technology to explode. But it hasn’t been touched enough yet, haven’t been solved the pain yet.”

This approach led to a four-month analysis period examining various technologies and market opportunities. “After screening around four to five months, different technologies, different panes, different verticals, we got to this cross section,” Dave explains.

Understanding Market Evolution

The opportunity emerged from a clear pattern in enterprise network evolution. As Dave describes: “Until 2000 ISh organization had only one type of enterprise network which we call all it. But then it split it to critical environment and regular it. And that’s been called as OT operational technology.” This evolution continued with cloud computing around 2010, and then in 2020, private 5G emerged as the next frontier.

Identifying the Security Gap

Through their analysis, OneLayer discovered a recurring pattern in enterprise technology adoption: “Security taken as an afterthought at the beginning of the pilot stage,” Dave notes. “And then the it team want to connect this amazing network to the rest of the organization network and the CISO or other security teams say, stop, you cannot connect that to my network. Where is the security stack?”

Building the Bridge

Rather than creating entirely new security frameworks or trying to force existing solutions onto new networks, OneLayer took a bridging approach: “We work very hard not to invent the wheel,” Dave explains. They started by examining how enterprises currently protect their IoT infrastructure, then identified the specific challenges in applying these solutions to private cellular networks.

Multi-Stakeholder Value Creation

This positioning enabled OneLayer to create value for multiple stakeholders: “We have the it that we simplify their life. We have the digital and innovation team that have the eager to push this domain forward and we have the economic buyer that really sees the value in the cost reduction once the product is being deployed.”

Framework for Market Evaluation

From OneLayer’s experience, we can extract a framework for evaluating market opportunities in complex enterprise environments:

1. Technology Readiness: Look for technologies that are mature enough to deploy but haven’t been fully integrated into enterprise environments.
2. Pattern Recognition: Identify recurring patterns in how enterprises adopt and struggle with new technologies.
3. Stakeholder Analysis: Map the different stakeholders involved and their specific pain points.
4. Integration Requirements: Understand how new solutions need to work with existing enterprise systems and processes.
5. Market Timing: Evaluate whether the market is ready for your solution and whether there are structural barriers to adoption.

Validation Through Demand

The effectiveness of this approach became clear as OneLayer entered the market. Even as an early-stage company, they faced “a challenge of over demand… because the domain is so defined, because IoT problems in enterprise domain is very clear, and because there is no good technologies that really designed for the private cellular because it’s a new domain.”

For B2B tech founders, OneLayer’s experience offers a valuable lesson: sometimes the best opportunities lie not in choosing between red and blue oceans, but in finding the spots where emerging technologies meet established enterprise needs. By taking time to understand market evolution patterns and stakeholder dynamics, founders can identify opportunities that combine the growth potential of new markets with the practical needs of enterprise customers.