From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian (Part 3)

Andrew Plato: I kept noticing that these companies kept tripping over integrating multiple components. Everything was custom. They can never turn it into a full-on platform. There were technical problems. AWS was stymied by this to some extent as well. They couldn’t quite pull it all together.

What it ultimately boiled down to is, nobody can pull together all these disparate companies into a cohesive structure. It was a VAR problem. They didn’t know how to license technology. They didn’t know how to manage these differing relationships with different kinds of partners.

It was fundamentally a VAR problem. Nobody had that experience. I did. I had done it for years. My VAR experience suddenly became very valuable. We were able to do something that so many other people couldn’t do. We had known many other companies who would try to build a platform like this. They could never seem to crack the nut.

It would usually fall down to how do you integrate these different technologies. It wasn’t a technical problem per se. It was a licensing and relationship problem. Our platform launched in 2017. That’s when we started with its development. We officially released our product at the end of 2018. 

Sramana Mitra: What was the product that you released in 2018?

Andrew Plato: It was compliance automation. It’s our cloud security compliance platform.

Sramana Mitra: Which customers did you bring it out to? It sounds like you had a good sense of customer problems and you had relationships with these customers. I presume you were able to bring it out to customers directly.

Andrew Plato: Yes. The reason other people couldn’t build it is because they didn’t have the experience that Anitian had.

Sramana Mitra: You had a key unfair advantage and domain knowledge to scope out this product.

Andrew Plato: When we released the product, we had a profound understanding of exactly what the problem was. It was a problem that nobody had really addressed in the way we were addressing it. Many people were coming at us from strictly a services model whereas we looked at it as a total problem.

It needed products and services. It needed everything put into a cohesive whole and directed at that problem. More importantly, it had to be positioned not as a technical solution, but as a business solution. That was the other innovation that we came up with.

We have a technical product that solves a business problem. The business problem is that you need to get an application quickly. Compliance and security are impediments for you to do that.

What our platform does is, it removes that impediment entirely. It accelerates the process such that you can now get your product to market or to customers faster. On top of that, it will be more secure and compliant. Who wouldn’t want that?

This segment is part 3 in the series : From a Security VAR to a $10 Million ARR SaaS Product Business: Andrew Plato, CEO of Anitian
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