Qualys Banks on Product Innovation

According to a recently published report, the global device vulnerability management market is estimated to grow 13% annually from $5.97 billion in 2019 to $16.3 billion by the end of 2025. Earlier this week, cloud-based security service provider Qualys (Nasdaq: QLYS) reported its second quarter results that surpassed market expectations.

Qualys’ Financials

Qualys saw second quarter revenues grow 16% over the year to $78.9 million, ahead of the market’s estimates of $78.6 million. It reported an EPS of $0.55 compared with the Street’s forecast of $0.47 and previous year’s $0.39.

For the current quarter, Qualys forecast revenues of $82.2-$82.7 million, and adjusted earnings of $0.52-$0.54 a share. The market was looking for revenues of $82.2 million with an EPS of $0.48.

It expects to end the current year with revenues of $321-$322.5 million and an EPS of $1.24-$1.28. The Street had forecast revenues of $322.1 million with an EPS of $1.93 for the year.

Qualys’ Product Innovation

Qualys continued to improve its product offerings to drive market adoption. Earlier this week, it announced a major update of its Indication of Compromise (IOC) solution, an integrated app that is delivered on the Qualys Cloud Platform. The IOC provides an enhanced attack detection, investigation, and response mechanism for security analysts, incident responders, and managed security service providers. It leverages the Qualys Cloud Agent for an organization’s asset inventory, vulnerability management, policy compliance, and patch management programs. The new incident scoring engine takes into consideration behavior attributes such as file analysis, process state, and network connections to prioritize responses based on how the attack is behaving in the network. This helps security analysts respond to the most critical attacks first.

Qualys IOC also extends the detection of malicious, suspicious, and fileless attacks to deliver a higher security while eliminating the need for additional higher cost solutions needed to manage these risks. The IOC also allows security analysts to create alerts and notifications on a real-time basis to push critical insights needed to investigate and remediate incidents.

Earlier this quarter, Qualys also entered into an agreement with Coalfire, a provider of cyber security assessment and advisory services, to integrate its vulnerability management and continuous monitoring capabilities into Coalfire’s Secure Cloud Automation Services (SCAS). Coalfire’s SCAS leverages its security, compliance, and engineering experience to quickly deploy pre-configured cloud infrastructure that can help meet an organizations’ security and compliance needs. The tie-up with Qualys will help Coalfire’s SCAS clients get access to Qualys’s vulnerability management offerings to help improve their cloud asset security posture.

Earlier this week, Qualys also announced that its Global IT Asset Discovery and Inventory app will be available to all businesses for free. The Discovery and Inventory app allows organizations to create a continuous, real-time inventory of known and unknown assets across the global IT footprint. It automatically classifies and categorizes assets to provide visibility on the system, services, installed software, network, and users. Organizations will be able to purchase additional features such as hardware and software lifecycle and license information, the ability to tag business-critical assets and additional workflows through a subscription service from Qualys.

Its stock is currently trading at $83.34 with a market capitalization of $3.3 billion. It touched a 52-week high of $98.30 in July last year. The stock has recovered from the 52-week low of $65.94 that it had fallen to in December last year when most technology stocks had fallen.