How Optiv Evolved from a VAR to a Different Kind of Partner
By eschewing traditional labels and listening to the market, Optiv navigated the transition from reseller to MSSP to systems integrator with rarely seen success.
Times, they are a-changin’. The traditional value-added reseller (VAR) isn’t just trying to grapple with the move to recurring managed services anymore. Now their competition is getting more sophisticated: developing vertical specializations, building managed security services practices and learning how to sell on value rather than price. It’s enough to make a VAR throw its hands up and decide it just can’t be done. If you’re one of these skeptics who needs some proof, cast your eyes to Optiv.
Peter Evans, chief marketing officer at Optiv, is a self-professed telco guy whom mutual friends pulled into a cybersecurity venture. After stints at a couple of security firms and consulting with venture capitalists, Evans left the industry for six or seven years. When he came back, he expected a learning curve, but learned the more things change, the more they stay the same.
“The only thing that really changed was that you could add a zero on the end of every single number,” said Evans. “The number of vendors, the number of hacks and attacks, the number of breaches, the number of losses, the number of security tools the average company had in their environment — it just seemed like everything had grown by an order of magnitude.”
Peter Evans
Peter Evans
Evans estimates there are 3,000 security firms in the market. With all of those choices, how is a chief security officer (CSO) or chief information officer (CIO) supposed to keep track? One CSO at a large chemical company told him the business had 17 security tools on every single endpoint. The CSO had no idea how they got there, who bought them, who was configuring them or who was managing them.
Clearly, there was a gap in the managed security services market, and Optiv, which had reached a level of success not often seen by VARs, saw an opportunity to pivot and focus its effort on cybersecurity services.
Pivoting Pain Points
Optiv knew where it wanted to go: to build relationships that let it focus on business outcomes rather than strict IT solutions. It wanted its clients to look at their business models first and then continually work backward to define what they needed from a security program, security tools and, finally, best practices and processes.