We have picked a good time to pivot the IT-Harvest Dashboard from the only platform for cybersecurity industry research to the only platform for cybersecurity product research. How companies find and select products has become a big question. Industry analyst firms like Forrester, Gartner, Omdia, and 451 (S&P) were formed to provide that guidance. But the pace of innovation and the expansion in hot spaces like cybersecurity and now AI is straining the old model.
Gartner for instance does not even cover these ten cybersecurity unicorns in magic quadrants.
What about marketplaces on the cloud service providers’ platforms? Cole Grolmus is writing about the large number of deals funneling though AWS, GCP, and Azure marketplaces. But those are just purchasing vehicles, like being on a GSA schedule when selling to the US federal government. In another post Cole stated:
“We're at a crucible moment in time, caught between the past of top-down sales and steak dinners, reeling from the illusion of Product-Led Growth (PLG), and more discontent about buying and selling cybersecurity products and services than ever.”
I don’t have a complete idea for fixing the broken purchasing cycle in our industry. But I am convinced that having access to data can only help. Thus, we harvest (get it? IT-Harvest?) complete data on 3,974 vendors today. From those vendors we have identified10,678 products.
For each product we capture its name, description, features, and alignment with NIST categories and MITRE ATT&CK techniques.
Note, these are not cut&paste from the vendor’s website. We ingest the entire website and use some careful prompt engineering to extract these.
If we are going to solve the purchasing problem, the first step is a complete database that is searchable and filterable. The goal is to quickly get to a short list of viable products. We can draw on our vendor data as well as product data to make that happen. Maybe you have a country preference or a funding stage preference?Maybe you are headed to BlackHat and want a list of vendors to visit in the expo? (We created that list from our database for you.)
What’s the next step? Reach out to the vendor for a demo? How about watching a demo first? We have started ingesting demos from the Demo Forum. These professionally produced videos are the best I have seen. We are including the 188 videos we have received from the Demo Forum. Our subscribers can see them on the main profile page.
Click on the thumbnail and go right to the collection of media we maintain for the vendor
And here is the video player:
Now that we have media files it was time to update the global search feature in the Dashboard. Here is what a search on Armis gives you. You get results for products, investors, news, and media:
We have so much more in store for the Dashboard. Don’t forget you can get free access for the 317 companies exhibiting at BlackHat next week. Just go to dashboard.it-harvest.com/blackhat to sign up. That will be live for a limited time.
After the conference we have plans to launch the IT-Harvest Cyber150, a curated list of vendors that are worth watching and reporting on. There will be no way for a vendor to buy its way onto the list or to even influence us—other than growing fast, improving its Black Kite scores, getting funding, and increasing its hiring activity.
If you are going to BlackHat, stop by Black Kite’s booth either day of the Expo at 3 PM to meet me and get a signed copy of Security Yearbook 2024, the only history of the cybersecurity industry.