Proofpoint Protect: Rising Vendor, Partner Revenues Amid COVID-19

PROOFPOINT PROTECT — The kickoff of this week’s Proofpoint Protect 2021 highlighted the cybersecurity vendor’s continued growth during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thoma Bravo is acquiring Proofpoint for a whopping $12.3 billion. The companies anticipate the acquisition will close in the third quarter of 2021.

Also during Proofpoint Protect, the vendor announced several people-centric innovations across its three flagship platforms. Those are threat protection, compliance, and the new information protection and cloud security.

Vendor Milestones

Gary Steele is Proofpoint‘s CEO.

Proofpoint’s Gary Steele

“[Last] October, we were the first cybersecurity SaaS company to surpass $1 billion in trailing, 12-month revenue,” he said. “Fast-forwarding to February, we acquired a really interesting company, and something that we’re excited to be talking about, InteliSecure. It has traditionally offered managed services for enterprise data loss prevention (DLP) customers. We were excited about this simply because we could bring this tremendous talent into Proofpoint to help our customers transition from those legacy environments to this people-centric enterprise DLP solution.”

Proofpoint “powered through” the pandemic “quite nicely,” Steele said.

“We continued to drive this long track record of growth,” he said. “We crested over 3,700 employees and we continued to hire through the pandemic. And one of the things I did early on when the pandemic broke is we made a commitment to our employees that we wouldn’t be laying anyone off, and we didn’t. Not only did we not lay people off, but we continued to add to all those critical functions that touch customers.”

High Renewal, Adoption Rates

Proofpoint added to R&D, customer service and customer support, Steele said.

“We continued to drive a very high renewal rate, greater than 90%, and we see broader adoption of our product line by our customers, with today over 70% of our customers having three of our products,” he said. “I feel very good about the position we’re in today as we can can start to feel like we’re emerging from this pandemic.”

Proofpoint’s Joe Sykora

Joe Sykora is Proofpoint’s senior vice president of worldwide channel and partner sales.

“Now is an excellent time to partner with Proofpoint,” he said. “We have an award-winning partner program and industry leading cybersecurity and compliance solutions taking a people-centric approach. We continue to innovate and redefine the industry with our three flagship platforms. Proofpoint’s partners play a critical strategic role in our growth strategy as we continue to expand into new markets and offer new solutions. Our partner revenue and contribution is increasing.”

Scroll through our slideshow above for highlights from Proofpoint Protect.