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Feature Gaps in Cyber Products · CYBR.Signal

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, happy Cyber Sunday.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Farnum here.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: Hope you're doing well.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_00: Been doing a little bit of thinking and even smaller bit of uh research on something I'm finding interesting here in our cybersecurity industry, and what's specifically around cybersecurity vendors in our industry.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So what I'm seeing is a lot of the cybersecurity vendors are either a kind of a large company, are either a company that's solving a large amount of issues in one space.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say like identity, they've got identity, they've got a directory, they've got vault, they've got a whole bunch of different features and are and are expanding what they do and solving a lot of different things and trying to compete with some of the other big vendors in that space.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Or you've got uh a startup that has that is only solving for essentially a particular problem.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's not necessarily just a feature.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: There are some vendors like that that just kind of have a feature that's you know that could be used for some other problem.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: But they have they have a lot of features, but they're still small, they haven't expanded out.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just don't think we've ever had this number of startups in an industry ever.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't done that research, but probably I think anecdotally I find that to be true.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason I bring this up is you've got this kind of a big gap between the two, and what you're seeing in those startups is that they're because they are they haven't had the time to solve for a bunch of different issues or bunch have put a bunch of features in their product that they are solving for whatever that is in a very particular way, and you could have somebody else trying to solve for that same problem in another way.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so let's say, for instance, I wrote a blog post about this at Set Solutions not too long ago.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, had a customer that uh was looking for API security solutions, and when we presented a few to them, we found that two of them, one was solving it from a very developer-friendly perspective, and one was solving it more from a security and operations perspective.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: So the security and operations uh kind of focused vendor that had a lot of discovery options, they could they were really good on the op side of integrating with the API API gateway, that kind of thing.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: The developer-friendly one was solving it more from integrating into the development environment of the developers, it was more focused on the code itself and being very developer-friendly.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a very good chance that this customer is going to buy either either of those, it they probably won't get both.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So, what they're gonna be left with, and this is my you know where I'm kind of advising them, is that you need to think about this from the perspective of you are going if you've only got one line item in your budget, then you're only gonna be able to get one or the other if you don't have the money to do both, and you're gonna end up with a significant feature gap, and you're actually not gonna get your complete problem solved.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so I guess the point of all this, not I guess it is, the point I'm trying to make in all this is that if you are solving for a point issue like API security or something like that, that is kind of filled with a lot of startups and is not a more uh an area that has more mature vendors, you really need to do your due diligence in thinking through what feature sets and what is important to you in their feature sets for your business and what the problem is you're trying to solve.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you don't, you may end up spending money on something and it not fitting everything you need, and you won't have money to buy more or buy another vendor and bring them together.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, best case scenario is look for one that does both, but you may not have that choice.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, really got to do your due diligence there.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Let me know what you think about this.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, it's definitely something that's been on my brain a lot as I talk to my customers.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and yeah, that's it.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: Hopefully, it's uh something that doesn't last too long.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: So let me know what you think.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Happy Cyber Sunday, see you next time.