Proofpoint Protect: Rising Vendor, Partner Revenues Amid COVID-19
Proofpoint announced several people-centric innovations across its three flagship platforms.
Shutterstock
Thoma Bravo‘s acquisition of Proofpoint will take the company private. CEO Gary Steele told attendees a lot of good things will come from the pairing.
“I’m excited about this next chapter,” he said. “The fact that we can operate with greater latitude and flexibility. We can make longer-term investments, and I’m excited that it will make us more agile. And in this world right now with this high complexity and a complex threat environment, I think agility will be incredibly important.”
Now available, Proofpoint’s information protection and cloud security platform is the market’s first cloud-native solution that combines enterprise DLP, insider threat management, cloud app security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access, remote browser isolation, and a cloud-native web security solution.
In addition, new managed transition services are now available following the InteliSecure integration. This new service provides organizations with a partner with experience in migration and decommissioning as they replace their legacy DLP products with new people-centric innovations.
Channel chief Joe Sykora said the innovations announced provide new opportunities for Proofpoint partners.
“These new enterprise security solutions will allow our partners to offer our latest innovations to their clients, and provide an enhanced people-centric solution with advanced business email compromise (BEC) defense powered by our new Supernova detection platform,” he said. “This will create new opportunities for our partners with their clients both on the solution side and services side. Partners will be able to build new offerings and services around information protection.”
These new solutions will give Proofpoint partners a competitive advantage by offering protection and visibility in a completely integrated platform, Sykora said.
Steele outlined Proofpoint’s core priorities, focused on three things.
“The first is continued innovation across those platforms,” he said. “It’s really a matter of investment. Today, we’re putting roughly 20% of our revenue back into R&D. That translates to more engineers driving innovation and driving new capabilities out into the hands of our customers.”
The second focus is “relentless” dedication to customer success, Steele said.
“We want you to use every single aspect of our solution because we think that will drive a better security posture and will ultimately be better protected in this crazy world that we’re living in,” he said.
And the third continued focus is to integrate seamlessly with other market leaders, Steele said.
“From the CrowdStrikes to the Oktas of the world, SailPoint, CyberArk, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk, where we’ve differentiated ourselves is we’ve built technical integrations between ourselves and these market leaders,” he said. “Those technical integrations come free if you’ve licensed those products, and at the end of the day what you get is a better security posture.”
Proofpoint has been investing heavily in machine learning (ML) since the company’s founding, Steele said.
“We were early adopters of ML and those algorithms very early on, and they’ve shown tremendous results,” he said. “We’ve continued to up the game in this technology. We’re now really on our third generation of ML, and what is critical to this is the level of visibility that we have. We have unique visibility that other vendors, including Microsoft, don’t have because of customers that we serve, the position that we serve on the edge, being able to see what threat actors are doing, and bringing that all together into a set of data analytics that we can then run ML models on.”
During the “Risky Business Live” session hosted by cybersecurity podcaster Patrick Gray, a panel of CISOs were asked about solving the ongoing cybersecurity talent shortage. The panelists were David McCloud, Cox Enterprises‘ CISO, and Paige Adams, Zurich Insurance’s global CISO.
“Simply put, teach it sooner and teach everyone,” McCloud said. “Universities can’t solve this. It doesn’t take four years to become an expert. Let’s get it into high schools, Let’s make it available to anyone at any age and in any field. If we get out there early and put it in high schools, a 14-year-old is more than capable of growing into a (cybersecurity expert).”
Adams said it’s going to take a holistic approach.
“We need to get it out there younger,” he said. “We need to do more with diversity and inclusion, and getting folks from maybe populations who wouldn’t initially go to a university education. It’s a huge untapped resource. And we need to focus on apprenticeship programs, too, because not everybody needs a four-year degree in computer science to go and be an effective security analyst.”
Sherrod DeGrippo is Proofpoint’s senior director of threat research and detection. She said business email compromise (BEC) is the biggest threat just based on dollar value and frequency.
“BEC was one of those things that was easy to spot and it’s not like that anymore,” she said. “A lot of people think they have an eye to see it, and you can’t really tell that it’s BEC the way you used to be able to. Right now, we’re seeing them getting sophisticated in terms of getting into legitimate vendor management systems. So they’ll work through various different departments, accounts receivable, accounts payable, until they finally get to the point where they’re entered into a vendor management system as a legitimate vendor, which means every invoice they send gets paid because they’re authenticated in that vendor management system. And that can be an ongoing loss for years and years.”
Sherrod DeGrippo is Proofpoint’s senior director of threat research and detection. She said business email compromise (BEC) is the biggest threat just based on dollar value and frequency.
“BEC was one of those things that was easy to spot and it’s not like that anymore,” she said. “A lot of people think they have an eye to see it, and you can’t really tell that it’s BEC the way you used to be able to. Right now, we’re seeing them getting sophisticated in terms of getting into legitimate vendor management systems. So they’ll work through various different departments, accounts receivable, accounts payable, until they finally get to the point where they’re entered into a vendor management system as a legitimate vendor, which means every invoice they send gets paid because they’re authenticated in that vendor management system. And that can be an ongoing loss for years and years.”
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.
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like