Exabeam Spotlight20: Brand Transition to 'Solidify Voice' in Market

Exabeam on Tuesday unveiled its new tagline, “Outsmart the Odds,” part of an upcoming brand transition, during its virtual Spotlight20 conference.

This is the first part of the security information and event management (SIEM) vendor’s rebranding campaign. The brand transition will continue into 2021.

Ralph Pisani is Exabeam’s president. He told attendees that while other companies had to switch to virtual amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Exabeam has been a virtual company from the beginning.

Exabeam’s Ralph Pisani

“This has been a major adjustment for all of you,” he said. “We understand at Exabeam that budgets are going to be tight moving forward. You’re all going to be focused on getting more out of what you already have. Trust me, we will answer that call.”

‘Dramatic Facelift’ Coming

The goal of the brand transition is to “solidify our voice in the market,” Pisani said. Furthermore, the brand transition will make sure customers know that Exabeam is “disrupting an old way of doing things.”

“In cybersecurity, the only way to beat the odds is to outsmart the odds,” he said. “Every day, security teams are up against overwhelming odds, with billions of alerts, insider threats, false positives, expanding attack surfaces. They’re piecing together complex puzzles, trying to understand who did what, and why, and determine the real threats from the fake ones. The odds may be stacked against us. But with Exabeam, we can turn those odds in their favor.”

Over the next five months, Exabeam will undergo a “dramatic facelift” in its branding and messaging, Pisani said.

Nir Polak is Exabeam’s CEO and co-founder. He said the brand transition will benefit partners.

Exabeam’s Nir Polak

“So if you look at our technology partners or our MSSPs, it’s together trying to flip the odds back in the security team’s favor and in the analyst’s favor,” he said. “It’s us and our partners together being fearless against the odds, helping them combat, detect and respond to these modern threats. So it’s us working together with our partners to do the right thing for our customers.”

SaaS Transition

Exabeam has transitioned to a SaaS company, Pisani said.

“When we started the company, our vision was that SIEM should be a SaaS-based product,” he said. “But we realized that many of you had not made that transition. Even before the pandemic, we saw an amazing increase of desire and want to move to SaaS. We saw big cloud-first programs hit. The pandemic accelerated that, but the time has arrived.”

Year to date, 67% of Exabeam’s sales have been SaaS, Pisani said. SaaS allows Exabeam to provide “more, faster and at greater scale.”

“We now find ourselves that we replaced every other SIEM in the Gartner Magic Quadrant,” he said. “Also, we now sit on top of every SIEM in the Magic Quadrant, and provide value in terms of analytics and insider threat. People are still buying those other SIEMs and still have to bring money to Exabeam to get more value out of those SIEMs. Why is this? It’s because they’re focused on automating their investigation.”

The trend toward SaaS is going to continue even post COVID-19, Polak said.

“I think that no one’s going to go back to the normal brick-and-mortar office working scenarios,” he said. “We’re going to continue to see distributed workforces and distributed businesses from now, and I think, forever. It’s changed a lot. It just makes the businesses much more complicated. And for us, it’s the need to connect the dots from all the different silos within the business to allow them to have visibility and protect their data and assets.”

New investments in the Exabeam Partner Program this year include …

… a new sales and technical enablement program, dedicated programs for MSSPs and managed detection and response (MDR) providers, and sales promotions.

“We have a tight relationship with our partners today,” Polak said. “We have different teams that cultivate and build the relationships, and we try to keep them up to date. They’re going to get updates and they’re going to be learning a lot during Spotlight20. But also they’ll have the ability to interact with our customers and talk about the success stories that we had together as partners.”

More to Protect

Steve Moore is Exabeam’s chief security strategist. He said amid COVID-19, the attackers have changed along with what has to be protected.

Exabeam’s Steve Moore

“I was speaking to a CISO the other day and he said, ‘Look, I have to treat each each and every person’s home as their own branch office.’ Imagine only having to protect your Atlanta office and your Boston office, and all the controls and things we’ve been sort of measuring and working on have all kind of gone out the window,” said Moore.

Phishing attacks have surged, in some cases by 1,000%, Moore said. It’s tough to defend yourself when you have a new platform supporting a remote workforce, stressed individuals in the middle and increasing attacks.

“And my take is that after we sort of shake the cobwebs off of this, I think there’s going to be a great increase in the number of public breaches, meaning we will identify them here in probably six months,” he said.

Defenders now have a lot more to worry about with their remote workforces, Moore said.

“You have a defender that’s now worried about attackers,” he said. “They’re worried about compromised individuals, meaning their credentials have been stolen. They’re worried about people making mistakes from home, maybe somebody who needs more education that’s made a mistake, sent the wrong file, and all of that depends on intent. These defenders are having to figure out, is this a bad person? Is this a compromised person? Is this somebody who made a mistake or is this a bad business process?”

Exabeam lessens the burden of defense, Moore said. It allows the adversary to be caught, and determines intent or likely outcome of an attack.

“We want to continue to be the platform that organizations use as the lens to solve their their security problems,” he said. “We have even more obstacles now for defenders that … keep people in the dark, and we want to be that light … to help put together that cloud picture. And so it’s to be a better partner.”

Partner Awards

Also at Spotlight20, Exabeam announced its first annual Partner of the Year Awards. It recognized VARs, MSSPs, distributors, global service partners and technology alliances.

The Americas winners are:

The EMEA winners are

Asia-Pacific-Japan winners are

Overall winners are: