Premium ContentMouse over Home then click on Premium Content for information.In an industry poised for major growth next year and in the foreseeable future, Omaha-based digital security provider Solutionary is tangling with the big boys.
The 10-year-old company has been one of the top firms in the industry for a number of years, serving "a couple" of clients in the Fortune 10 and "many" in the Fortune 100. In 2011, revenue at the firm grew about 35 percent, said the company's founders, Steve Idelman and Mike Hrabik.
Idelman and Hrabik aren't the type of executives who need confirmation of their success. Before entering the digital security realm, Idelman was one of Omaha's leaders in the teleservices industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, Hrabik was one of Idelman's chief technology masterminds. And after Idelman and his wife, Sheri, sold their company for $155 million in 1995 to private investors, they teamed up and began to focus their efforts on starting Solutionary, which launched in 2000.
But this month, Solutionary reached one of its critical goals, one that isn't measured in dollar signs or growth.
Solutionary was named as one of six "leaders" in the Managed Security Services Provider industry by Gartner, the internationally recognized technology research firm. Others in the category were giants IBM, Symantec, Dell, Verizon and AT&T.
"This means that we've reached a very important milestone that we set out to reach when we founded the company," Idelman said. "We wanted to be formally acknowledged as one of a handful of important industry leaders.
"But we're not done."
In past years, Solutionary has dwelled in Gartner's "visionaries" category, which includes companies that have less market share, but still have strong services and the ability to serve customers. Being labeled one of the "leaders" means Solutionary is now competing for the largest enterprise clients and receives nearly all positive reviews from customers, according to the Gartner report.
In Gartner's "Magic Quadrant" report, analysts Kelly Kavanagh and John Pescatore wrote that Solutionary has made major gains in market share and has gained attention from major players in the industry through technology and business partnerships.
On a customer level, Solutionary is an industry leader in customization of data displays and reporting, meaning that clients can mold their security information in a way that's easiest to process, according to the Gartner report.
The acknowledgement, Idelman said, likely will bring Solutionary more business because the Gartner rankings are often used as a guideline by businesses looking to outsource their digital security operations.
"For most buyers, (the Gartner report) is at least a consideration," Idelman said.
Said Hrabik, the author of seven of Solutionary's technology patents: "In some cases, where it's an organization that's looking for a security vendor, they go to that report and put out a request for information from companies just in the leaders quadrant."
So, what exactly does a Managed Security Services Provider do?
At Solutionary, there are two major levels of services: monitoring and managing of security. In both cases, Solutionary is sifting through long strings of data from all devices on a client's network — desktop computers, phone systems, laptops, tablets and smartphones, for example — and trying to identify digital security breaches.
In monitoring contracts, when a breach is detected, the client is alerted of a problem and the client deploys its own solutions.
When managing, Solution actually controls the permissions and access that a company's employees have. And when a security issue arises, Solutionary assesses the threat — whether it's malware, hackers or cyber criminals — and uses technology to avoid the situation.
"The attacks are very sophisticated today. They're finding ways in that are not through the front door," Hrabik said. "They're coming in through e-mails. They're organizations that are trying to get in and targeting customers.
"They're not trying to kick the door down, they already have a key, so we set out to address that problem and build the technology and hire the right people to detect these very sophisticated attacks."
In addition to the Gartner recognition, Solutionary in late November received a "significant" investment from Clearlake Capital Group, a private investment firm in Santa Monica, Calif. The amount was not disclosed.
Solutionary, Idelman said, is going to use the investment for operations and to boost the company's marketing profile on a global scale.
Currently, Solutionary has about 175 employees, many of them technology and security specialists who are constantly analyzing and critiquing massive amounts of data. About 75 employees are located at the company's Omaha headquarters with another 50 at an operations center in Pittsburgh. About 50 sales and technology support employees are scattered around the Unites States.
By the end of the 2012 first quarter, Solutionary plans to add at least 25 employees.
And indicators are that the digital security industry is only going to continue growing as more companies outsource their security operations, add more mobile technology to their businesses and move more of their information technology, or IT, to cloud computing.
Kavanagh and Pescatore, the Gartner analysts, expect the MSSP industry to see "continued strong, if not spectacular, growth."
In 2010, the industry had North American revenue of $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion in 2009. In 2011, that number is expected to grow to $2.8 billion, according to the Gartner report.
Solutionary, which has about 1,000 customers around the globe, is projecting North American revenue growth to increase about 20 percent year-over-year for 2012, and about 15 percent globally, Idelman said. As companies become more digital, the bigger the MSSP industry, and Solutionary, will become, Idelman said.
"I hate to say it, but this doesn't appear to be an industry that's ever going to go away," he said. "It'll morph, but if you think about it, we've needed some form of security going back to cave men. Then in the industrial revolution, then you had mechanical security, physical security, then electro-mechanical, and now digital and cyber.
"There are good guys and bad guys, and I don't think any of us see that changing anytime soon."
Contact the writer:
402-444-1414, ross.boettcher@owh.com
twitter.com/rossboettcher
Copyright ©2012 Omaha World-Herald®. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, displayed or redistributed for any purpose without permission from the Omaha World-Herald.
