Two years ago we launched the first ever research platform for the cybersecurity industry. In the press release I said:
"Subscribers get access to all the data we use in our research and reports. They can do their own analysis to test an investment thesis, find targets for acquisition, or create a short-list of vendors for a particular technology they are looking to acquire."
Our primary target for the IT-Harvest Dashboard were people who, like me, researched the cybersecurity industry. That included other industry analysts, venture capitalists, and private equity firms. But what about those that are searching for particular cybersecurity products?
Today we are announcing a shift in our go-to-market. While the existing uses cases are still served by the only platform for cybersecurity industry research, we are moving towards a platform that security architects, CISOs, and their teams, can use to find and select cybersecurity solutions.
I have been struggling with questions about how to do this since my time at Gartner. I wanted the ability to harvest all the data on all the vendors in IT security. I am still convinced that the Gartner Magic Quadrant and all of the reports generated by the other firms do not fulfill their promise. There is no question they are used by many companies to select their vendors. I wrote a book about that. There is tremendous value in having a short list of options vetted by a group of industry experts. That value is the reason that Gartner does $5.9 billion in revenue from 15,400 of the largest organizations in the world.
But, as I have shown previously, (See 10 Cybersecurity Unicorns That You Won’t Find in a Gartner Magic Quadrant), Gartner only covers about 144 cybersecurity vendors in the 25 or so MQs they have published over the last few years. That is less than 4% of the vendors. And the number of MQs is going down. In the latest spreadsheet of their planned publications there are only nine cybersecurity MQs. In a space that is growing in size, Gartner is hiring analysts and selling access to them, but the company is reducing the actual research that it provides to help make purchasing decisions.
I am convinced that access to data can contribute to better purchasing decisions. A vendor’s size, health, funding, and growth rate are key points to know. The IT-Harvest Dashboard has all of that data on 3,773 vendors and their investors.
But now we have been ingesting product data from each vendor. That includes product names, descriptions, features, and alignment with Mitre ATT&CK techniques. it looks like this:
We paused ingestion at 10,265 products because we had early feedback from CISOs who were interested in the platform. We are expanding the depth of data we look at for each vendor, including their product documentation. This will give us more information to work with and enrich the descriptions of each product such as deployment scenarios and integrations.
Here is a quick demo that shows how you can find 55 hardware security modules (HSMs) with a single search, then refine it down to just five products meant for code signing.
We are going to iterate fast, just as we did with the original vendor database. Feel free to add feature ideas in the comments! And yes, we are already working on a compare feature.
Richard,
Gartner is the General Motors of broad-based business strategies, flavored with many generations of technology genes. They are very good at sweeping platitudes (much like this statement) and retain more specific knowledge as well. IT-Harvest is becoming the Porsche of the industry, doing far more for its customers/clients in a domain specific area of expertise -- Security. Porsche didn't kill GM. GM is very much alive but it won't kill Porsche either. The cognoscente will go with Porsche when they need the best. (We could debate Corvair vs Boxster or Corvette vs Porsche 911 GT3 but I'm not sure that would be more productive; entertaining perhaps.))
This looks like a phenomenal toolset. I can think of at a least a dozen use cases for almost any business.