Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The value proposition is still password management?

Jonathan Cogley: It’s a password vault but it’s really to prevent external or insider threats.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about what is the competitive landscape. This is a crowded space. What is the competitive landscape that you see around your product?

Jonathan Cogley: The space is getting crowded because there’s a bunch of people who are a little bit late to the party. Some of the big vendors are coming in. They’re trying to either acquire small startups that aren’t necessarily that successful and throw their weight behind it. One of the reasons we are able to succeed is due to the fact that we are a pure-play vendor. We don’t do anything else. CA is in the space too but they’ve entered recently. It’s much easier to beat them in deals because the customer can quickly see that this is not CA’s core focus whereas Thycotic has been doing this for 12 years.

James Legg: I’d like to add that we have about 4,000 maintenance paying customers. We also have a low-end version of our product. We have 4,000 additional customers on that. Honestly, there is only one or two legitimate competitors out there when you add in all the functions and features that we have. Specifically on a Fortune 1,000 company, there are very few companies out there that have integrated products like ours. There is only one competitor that can really go against us in these larger transactions. It’s not very crowded.

Sramana Mitra: Who is that?

Jonathan Cogley: Our primary competitor is a company called Cyber Arc.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the trends that you see in the industry right now and what are the open problems?

Jonathan Cogley: There’s quite a few trends that we’re seeing, specifically in account management and around being more secure as an IT department. One of the big ones that we’re seeing is a shift to the cloud. We are seeing more and more of these companies are investing in IT budgets in a hybrid cloud environment or in a complete public cloud. That’s changing the mindset for security a bit.

How do you secure something that’s completely outside your perimeter or is controlled and managed by third-party contractors. Vendors like Thycotic are having to think about that. We give our customers the necessary tools to be able to manage those environments too. Another big trend that we’re seeing in the industry in general is the move beyond just controlling what you know and what you can think of ahead of time.

Privilege account management today is about discovering accounts, setting up rules, managing and changing passwords, and rotating them. The trend that we’re starting to see now is you have to have those prescriptive controls but what are you missing? What are the anomalies that are happening in your environment? We are seeing this User Behaviour Analytics. That is something that Thycotic is investing in and is something that we’ll have offerings for in the future – being able to detect anomalies in the environment and being able to bring those to the dashboards for the security admins so they can take actions against those.

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see opportunities for a new entrepreneur to start a company?

Jonathan Cogley: There’s so many. My focus is specifically IT security which is hot at the moment. If you look at just the conferences, the attendance in the last couple of years has gone through the roof. If they’re looking for funding or talent, IT security in general is a great area. It seems like breaches and being able to do breach detection, breach remediation, and forensic gathering are big areas of opportunity. There are a lot of people jumping onto those areas too. Whatever you come up with, it’s going to have to be something that customers are prepared to look at.

James Legg: If you look at the space that we’re playing in and what people consider to be breaches, most of the major significant breaches including the one that just happened at the Bank of Bangladesh, they almost all revolve around what Jonathan said at the beginning – privilege user access. We think it’s definitely on the mind and forefront of security administrators today.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Congratulations and good luck.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Thycotic James Legg CEO and Jonathan Cogley
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