On March 19, 2014, Verdasys named former McAfee security executive Kenneth Levine its CEO, replacing Jim Ricotta, and announced a $12 million investment round. The company said it would use the financing to expand product development and pursue a broader partner-led sales strategy for Digital Guardian, its enterprise data loss prevention platform. Those were plans announced in 2014, not evidence of present-day company or product status.
Who became Verdasys CEO?
Kenneth Levine took over as CEO from Jim Ricotta, Verdasys announced on March 19, 2014. Levine had been a security management executive at McAfee and previously served as CEO and chairman of NitroSecurity. CRN also reported that he was a co-founding partner of Brookline Venture Partners. CRN’s March 19, 2014 report described Levine as part of the startup team at Cabletron Systems, where he served as executive vice president of sales for 15 years; it reported nearly $2 billion in Cabletron revenue without specifying the period or measurement method for that figure.
What was the $12 million investment meant to fund?
The March 2014 round was led by existing investors GE Pension Trust and Fairhaven Capital, with a new individual investment from Brookline Venture Partners, according to CRN. Verdasys said the money would support product development and expansion into new markets, use cases, partnerships, and channels. Levine told CRN that the company intended to build a more robust partner program, add channel-support staff, and double its engineering team. These were stated intentions; the announcement does not establish that each goal was later achieved. Verdasys’s March 19 announcement also said nearly two million endpoint agents had been deployed globally at that time.
What was Digital Guardian, and how did Verdasys plan to sell it?
Digital Guardian was Verdasys’s agent-based enterprise DLP platform. CRN described it as using behavior-based data to address insider and external threats, with both on-premises and managed-service delivery options. Verdasys reported 200 customers in 2014; examples named by CRN included DuPont, Siemens, the U.S. Department of Justice, GE, Cigna, Honda, and Ferrari. Those customer and deployment figures are company-reported historical figures, not current counts.
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Levine’s channel strategy was selective rather than simply maximizing partner numbers. He told CRN the goal was to find the right partners in the right spaces so the company and its partners could support customers and grow the business. In August 2014, he described partners as trusted advisers able to combine products into solutions tailored to a customer’s security posture, data-protection strategy, and IT environment. The channel could include resellers, consultants, systems integrators, and managed-service providers; the managed-service route offered an alternative to an on-premises deployment.
Which integrations and managed-service relationships were named?
CRN’s March 2014 account cited relationships with FireEye, Hewlett-Packard, Citrix, and IBM, as well as a Fidelis OEM relationship for managed DLP. In an August 5, 2014 follow-up, CRN reported integrations including FireEye, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, HP-ArcSight, and Splunk, along with Citrix ShareFile support. That follow-up also said the company planned channel resources in the Americas, India, and Asia. These names describe reported relationships and plans in 2014; the articles do not establish that the integrations or partner arrangements remain available today. CRN’s August 5, 2014 follow-up reported that Verdasys had rebranded as Digital Guardian.
How did the company describe its product direction?
Alongside DLP, Levine said Verdasys wanted to extend Digital Guardian toward malware and advanced-threat detection. In August, he described using data already collected by the agent for broader cyber use cases involving insider and outsider threats and device control. This was a stated product direction in 2014, not confirmation of specific capabilities delivered later.
CRN also quoted Gartner’s historical estimate that the DLP market was worth $680 million to $710 million in 2013 and was projected to grow 22% to 25%, reaching approximately $830 million by the end of 2014. That was a forecast reported in 2014, not a current market-size estimate.
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What the announcement does—and does not—establish
The March 2014 news was a leadership and financing announcement tied to a planned expansion of Verdasys’s partner channel and Digital Guardian’s product scope. The available 2014 coverage does not establish Verdasys’s current corporate status, Digital Guardian’s current availability or ownership, whether the named integrations remain supported, or whether a current partner program exists.
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- Author: Bungay Stanier, Michael.
- Publisher: Page Two
- Pages: 244
- Publication Date: 2016-02-29
- Edition: 1
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