How Accuvant Aims To Keep Ahead of Cyberattacks

Dan Wilson
Dan Wilson

Like most companies focused on eradicating malware and thwarting cyberattacks, Accuvant is at no loss for business opportunities. Its biggest worry is investing in the skills to keep the bad guys at bay.

"There's just not enough people," said Dan Wilson, co-founder and senior vice president of the Denver-based national security technology specialist.

With more than 100 open positions, Accuvant is getting creative with its recruiting by canvassing universities with strong programs in computer science and getting tight with organizations that can help it connect with ex-military personnel, he said.

Once it finds someone with the right philosophy to fight the bad guys, Accuvant is willing to invest the three to nine months it takes to get someone ready to fight real-world threats. "It's tricky because its expensive, but it's something we have to do," Wilson said.

Investing for the long term is nothing new for Accuvant, founded in 2002 to focus exclusively on information security. In 2013, the company recorded gross revenue of $577 million, propelling it into the top 50 on CRN's latest Solution Provider 500 list. An equally impressive achievement: it has been on the ranking for the past eight years running, a relatively unique feat shared by fewer than one-third of the companies on this year's list.

Two other fun facts: its client list is more than 6,200 accounts long, and more than 85 percent of its revenue comes from repeat business.

Until now, most of Accuvant's growth has been organic (just one acquisition) but the company's decision early this year to sell a majority stake to equity firm Blackstone could change things.

"We'll be able to make internal investments, building out our training group, making investments on our marketing side, expand our footprint geographically," Wilson said. When I asked about potential acquisitions, he demurred saying, "In the fairly near future, we'll have some interesting things to talk about as an organization."

One focus he's more than happy to discuss is Accuvant's focus on managed services. About 10 percent of the company's overall revenue is attributable to services today, mostly consulting and product integration work. But by 2016, Wilson envisions a scenario in which high-level threat monitoring, vulnerability management, incident handling, and "actionable intelligence" services generate 80 percent of its overall services mix. The latter is a focus of Accuvant LABs, staffed by more than 250 security experts.

"We aren't doing as much of this now as we will in a few months," Wilson said.

That said, product revenue remains a very important part of the Accuvant sales model. With literally dozens of new security companies emerging every week — hawking everything from better mobile device coverage to protection for virtualized servers — it's difficult to sort through the vendor noise.

Wilson categorizes partnerships into three categories: "strategic" (ones that have the potentially to generate close to $100 million in annual revenue); "good" ($30 million to $50 million) and emerging (self-explanatory). "To turn a relationship strategic, there needs to be a significant addressable market," he said.

One of Accuvant's closest partners is Palo Alto Networks; this week, it was named the vendor's Americas National Partner of the Year for the fourth year in a row. “As a channel-driven company, we choose to work with the highest-performing partners to meet customer demand for a true next-generation enterprise security platform," said Todd Palmer, vice president, Americas Channels at Palo Alto Network. "We thank Accuvant for exceeding expectations once again and congratulate all of our outstanding Americas partners for a great year.”

Other notable relationships include McAfee, F5 Networks, RSA and Symantec, Wilson said. "Since the early days, we have been careful not to define ourselves by our manufacturer partners," he said. "It is the business, but we are careful not to define ourselves as being so linked. We consider our sales team as an extension of my customers' sales group."