Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m absolutely on the same page with you. For the small to medium business segment, it has to be as a cloud service offering. It’s hard for a player to go both enterprise and SME because the go-to-markets are so different. The DNA is so different. Everything is so different. It’s hard to do both for one company. A $50 million company has to be somewhat focused. That’s my question.

Craig Hinkley: Now I understand the question. From a market perspective and serving the market, the underlying technology capability to serve the SME versus the large enterprises is the same. Yes, your go-to-market may be different, but one of the benefits of being Security-as-a-Service is we can scale that offering.

The challenge that I’m faced with as the CEO is making sure that we serve the right markets with the correct go-to-market strategy. That’s why our go-to-market strategy is using both direct and indirect models. Indirect models are channels and partnerships that can scale to handle those other segments that we may not want to touch and serve directly. Through an indirect strategy involving channel partners and partner relationships, we can serve that market. Then, we use a more direct, high-touch strategy for servicing the medium to large enterprise market.

Sramana Mitra: So what you’re saying is you intend to go after that market as well with an indirect channel strategy. You acknowledge that there is a gigantic opportunity there.

Craig Hinkley: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: I would venture to say there are opportunities for new ventures to also cater to that market. While the technology is hard, if there is expertise and technology in a startup that focuses specifically just on the small business market, that is also an opportunity. It’s a very large market.

Craig Hinkley: It’s a very large market. Part of it is the technology capabilities and solutions that WhiteHat brings, but there’s an opportunity for companies to come in and address certain segments of the market and offer unique solutions. That can be a combination of Security-as-a-Service providers combined with their own consulting capabilities or solution capabilities to build a turnkey solution for that particular segment of the market. That’s where there are opportunities for entrepreneurs who may have a strong skillset and knowledge base of a certain segment to go build a cybersecurity practice for that target market.

Sramana Mitra: Secure website development practice.

Craig Hinkley: Yes, exactly. If you think about GoDaddy who want to help customers develop websites, it’s a natural play for them to say, “We build your website and for this other fee, we’ll provide you a cyber insurance capability where we’ll ensure that your website is developed in a way that doesn’t have lots of defects or vulnerabilities.” There is certainly that opportunity in the market place today.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security
1 2 3 4 5