BlackBerry Limited (BB) Presents at 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference (Transcript)

BlackBerry Limited (NYSE:BB) 24th Annual Needham Growth Conference January 11, 2022 5:00 PM ET

Company Participants

Tim Foote – Head of IR

Ryan Permeh – SVP & Chief Security Architect

Eric Milam – VP Research Operations

Conference Call Participants

Matt Calitri – Needham

Matt Calitri

Hi, everyone. And welcome back to the Needham Growth Conference. My name is Matthew Calitri. And I’m a member of our software research team here in Needham. I’m pleased to be joined by Tim Foote, Eric Milan, and Ryan Permeh from BlackBerry.

One quick housekeeping items before we get going here, is that for anyone viewing this session live via the conference site, please feel free to enter questions into the Q&A box below the presentation, we’ll do our best to get to all of them.

And now I’ll turn it over to the guys here.

Tim Foote

Wonderful. Thanks, Matt. And thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to join us today on this call. We always appreciate you doing that.

So I’m just going to — well, first of all, try and get the technology to work and not mess that up. And hopefully you can see my slides. So let me just very quickly put the safe harbor statement up just to make sure we’re clear on a few of those ground rules. And then then we’ll get going.

So there we go. So before I dive in, I just wanted to just give a quick, very, very high level overview of the business and just sort of set the scene for today’s talk. So you may recall that earlier this fiscal year, we divided in to 2 core business units around which we’ve organized our business. And we’re very excited about the product sets in both of them and the market opportunities that they should address because there’s some really exciting opportunities.

And you may have been following the last week or so, we were at CES. And at CES, we spent a lot of time talking about particularly the IoT opportunity. You may have been good enough to tune into the IV demonstration that we did with Mattias Eriksson, where we actually demonstrated IV running on auto grade hardware. You may have seen that we announced that we’ve had our first proof-of-concept for IVY with PATEO with the idea that if the product runs well, it will get designed into the new models for leading Chinese automaker.

And you may have also seen our announcements around BMW in the fact that they’re going to build some of the L2 and L2 plus autonomous drive functionality on QNX foundational software. So we’ve spoken a lot about our IoT business in the last few weeks, and rightly so we’re very excited about it, and also the secular trends that that are pushing that business forward.

But today, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about cybersecurity. And with me on the call, we have Ryan Permeh, and Eric Milam. So Ryan, some of you may have heard speak before. Ryan’s our Senior Vice President and Chief Security Architect. And he’s one of the cofounders of Cylance. And Ryan is responsible — certainly lead the groundbreaking AI approach to cybersecurity, which was a significant shift from what we’d seen in the past. And prior to founding Cylance, Ryan was the Chief Scientist at McAfee, where he was responsible for focusing on technology strategy. Ryan’s a notable speaker at worldwide securities conferences. And he actually holds over 20 patents in cybersecurity and data science. So that’s — I find that that’s a great step.

And we got Eric Milam as well. He’s our Vice President of Threat Intelligence. Eric spent a good chunk of time actually on the other side trying to ethically break into systems and find out the vulnerabilities to help people to patch their network, so as a pen tester, penetration tester. And one of the notable things he’s doing at Blackberry is a significant involvement in our guard managed extended detection and response offering. And Eric will tell you more about that.

So essentially, what I’ve got on the call here today, and we’ll give this presentation to you, is deep industry expertise. So hence by today, we’re focusing quite rightly on the opportunities and the technology that we have on the cybersecurity side of the house.

So I think that’s enough for me. So I’m going to hand over now to Ryan, who’s going to talk a little bit about our journey as a company.

Ryan Permeh

Thanks, Tim. As mentioned, my name is Ryan Permeh. I focus in the office of the CTO here on technology strategy and kind of helping BlackBerry to fundamentally see where they’re going. And to best do that, you have to understand where we’ve been. And BlackBerry’s journey has been a long and storied one. Obviously a global brand with an immense reach noted for completely innovating cellphone technology and really inventing the concept of a smartphone.

These days we’re a very different company. Coming from those individual devices that were hardware oriented, they’ve always had a long history of security whether that’s hardware, cryptography, and secure communications.

These technologies still exist within Blackberry, even though we no longer produce handsets. And they power both our cybersecurity side as well as our IoT side. As Tim said, with acquisition of QNX. That enabled us to really deeply reach into the automotive space, where we operate on over 195 million vehicles these days, powering everything from engine control to the most advanced, autonomous ADAS stuff like Tim mentioned with BMW. We’ve deployed up into the International Space Station for a variety of embedded system capabilities.

Now, on the other side of this our enterprise side, what is now known as our cybersecurity side, we started with a product acquired from good technology is called UEM. UEM gives us a singular management platform for a wide variety of technology deployments, both desktop and mobile. It gave us a containerization strategy allowing us to secure data regardless of where it existed.

BYOD was very hot for a long time, and then went quiet. But now in the days of COVID, it’s coming back with a vengeance. Meaning that that data, as long as it’s not inside your walls, still needs to be protected. That asset, that that laptop, that cell phone that that cloud server still needs to be protected. And this history of BlackBerry, this traditional cryptography, secure communications and policy setting history sets a really powerful baseline for where we are today.

Now, I came to BlackBerry about 3 years ago with the acquisition of Cylance. Cylance focused on application of artificial intelligence to stop threats. And similar, I’ve spent my entire career in security, but I’ve done it rather than policy in cryptography, I focused on what the attacker does. And Eric will be talking later, equally focused on the attacker side of this. And so as we built Cylance, we built it in the mind of stopping threats. And these two approaches pair exceptionally well along this now to leverage some of the history of BlackBerry in secure communications and cryptography, and pair it with some really leading edge cloud native cloud first type of technologies that we built in endpoint protection, EDR and identity.

I’m going to pass on to Eric and he’s going to talk a bit more about our current line.

Eric Milam

Thanks, Ryan. Yeah, so security teams face numerous challenges, as attackers become speedier and more sophisticated and executing stealthy, multi-vector attacks across the entire attack surface.

EDR solutions set the stage by delivering powerful threat detection and incident response capabilities within the realm of endpoints. But this is really only the beginning of an effective security strategy, right? Our rallying cry, it’s always been prevention. First, we prevent breaches. So everything we focus on is to accomplish that goal, regardless of the platform used by our customers. Now, this approach differs from relying solely on endpoint detection, or EDR. As EDR focuses on post-breach events, after the foxes in the hen house.

And just like traditional AV software, EDR uses signatures. That’s to say, if this is the only line of defense and the attack has not been seen before, the fox will have definitely done its damage. Now, in a time where traditional security products relied heavily on detecting known threats, we started thinking about using AI to determine if a file was good or bad before it’s ever run and before it’s already known.

And to make this idea a reality we collected a large amount of data that formed the basis of our first model, which was known as Apodo [ph]. Now this model was the start of a revolution that now sees our Windows model at its seventh generation. Even today, traditional signature-based AVs like McAfee, Symantec, they’re still used by enterprises. Even though they’re really estimated to be about 30% to 40% effective at preventing previously unseen attacks.

We now products also that include models for not where as I had just said, not just Windows based file systems, but MacOS, several Linux based distributions, as well as Office documents and PDFs. We’ve expanded into the mobile arena within APK model for Mobile Threat Detection product, and our Persona and Gateway products, they take advantage of several different AI models working in conjunction to ensure robust protection for today’s zero trust cyber concerns.

So industry analysts, they say that visibility into events after a breach is the most important factor. And again, we believe that EDR is an important capability, but never at the cost of prevention. It’s much better to prevent the attack, provide a contextual analysis of what could have happened, versus identifying the damage after it’s happened. These type of postmortem reports also frequently come months after the initial event. So in the end, it’s really that prompt contextual information and intelligence that helps customers have peace of mind.

And as someone who’s had a career on the offensive side of the field, as Ryan was mentioning and Tim, I know there’s areas of the attack, where may require EDR as part of the solution to obtain that information. And as a company, we’ve used this knowledge to make significant progress with our Optics EDR to strengthen his offering to complement our leading Protect EOP. And so with BlackBerry Protect and Optics working together on a single platform, we’re able to provide more than 99% protection against all attacks, including those that are unknown.

Next slide, please. So AI is our core strategy as I was saying earlier. And unlike all of our competitors, every product in our platform incorporates machine learning and artificial intelligence. We have more AI related patents than any other security vendor. This continues to prove that we’re the most innovative AI driven company in the space. Our focus and determination ensures that we’ll never stop listening, learning growing and innovating. So one of the great things that comes out of building these models is something we call predictive advantage.

And our predictive advantage against some of the biggest threats this year in 2021 show that a model that we built in 2016 effectively predicted and prevented the malware used in today’s attack. So all the ransomware and all the things you’re hearing about in the headlines that we’re going to touch on a bit later. Our model from 2016 was able to prevent those.

BlackBerry products are protecting our customers against these threats by using our forward looking technology to stop these attacks with a five year advantage over the industry awareness. So we accomplished this because the models that we have, we’ve analyzed trillions of files and identified over 20 billion characteristic files which have been carefully dissected and curated specifically for that maximum effect when we do train those models.

It’s also important to highlight the areas where we use machine learning and AI that might not actually be visible directly within our product. We use ML not just to identify it ingest data, but to understand multisensory data across all of our products. This includes looking at sensor data from a myriad of products across both a timeframe and also an execution sequence to really identify when these multiple events stack up to become recognizable as an actual attack. And by using a multisensory data, we’re actually able to reduce alert fatigue for those using our platform. And this is — this means our operational efficiency has a direct effect on the efficiency gains for our customers.

It’s also important to address ml regarding threat hunting across large sets of data to ensure we stay against — we stay ahead of the curve. We track a large set of worldwide threat actors. And we use ML and AI indicators to do that as well. So for every threat actor or attack, we identify, we build models to identify their APT level tool set and tactics. And out of that a true hunting model greatly expands our detection capabilities by leveraging all the data that we have from the indicators based on those sets several layers of data. Now this allows us a unique opportunity to identify threats faster. And proper action can then be taken either by customers directly or via our guard analysts, which I’ll talk about later.

And really to sum this all up, we use AI and ML across all stages of the data lifecycle, to ingest the data, to process and analyze the data, and within our data lake to correlate amalgamate our data into contextual intelligence for the customers using our platform.

Next slide, please, Tim. And so as I alluded to earlier, I spent a large part of my career on the offensive side essentially being the problem we’re really trying to solve here. And out of that kind of experience comes our awareness of the anatomy of an attack. And although a web search might show some deviation through my experience, the following is what attackers are most likely to follow. They get access to a system in the in an organization, they work to get a lay of the land, they build out a base camp, they propagate and exploit other systems. Then they look to exfiltrate data, and then something I like to call burning down the house.

So I’m going to dig a bit deeper into each step to discuss the activities of these attacks and the products we have that defender current and future customers. So the most common way for an attacker to gain access to the system is still exposing credentials. Now this could be through spear phishing, weak credentials, or after sale of previously stolen credentials via an online marketplace.

So we already have products to combat this in Protect and Persona. Another common way though on to systems is via unpatched applications, or administration access exposed to the internet. So our Optics product can be leveraged to determine malicious system behavior and attack and stop additional progress.

Now, once the attacker is on a system and environment, they make it that far, obviously they need to get their bearings as to where they are in the organization. And there are several techniques used for this including forms of system reconnaissance that set back to the attackers command and control server.

Now that command and control server may then provide additional commands or even malware. And at this stage, the goal of the attacker is to understand what targets to go after next. And our products such as Optics, Persona and Gateway create a symbiotic layer of protection to detect and prevent at each of these steps. So from stealing user credentials to malicious network traffic, our solutions have a cover.

Now another goal of the attacker that has — if they do make it this far is to find a cozy corner within the organization where they can set up a camp, right. They want to go undetected and continue to collect their data. Usually the first system that’s compromised that they gain access to it’s not the best one to stay on. And, as an attacker wants to really ensure a level of persistence and access for them to continue to the attack as long as they requires what they want. And so all of these activities are mitigated with a combination of Protect, Optics and Gateway.

And then in a rather rinse repeat fashion, attackers get to want to dig deeper and deeper into an environment to find sets sensitive information. This could be either a data intellectual property or really anything that’s determined is sensitive to the organization. As part of our defenses, our DLP Persona and Gateway work in conjunction to stop an attacker should they even make it this far as well.

So again, once an attacker has enough data collected, like to send it back out to their servers, and maybe a nightly send, it may be a slow bleed. But the goal is to get the info they have out of the network and back to a place where they have complete control over it. So obviously, again, our immediate goal is to prevent that and our Gateway product can do that. Most companies have no idea in this situation, what files may have left their environment. By leveraging DLP, we can pick quickly provide a list of all items, a specific account has access, helping companies better understand the possible risk to their organization.

And once an attacker believes they have everything they came for — this is the burning down the house part — they tend to pick an avenue for further money making strategies. Most commonly they deploy ransomware and hope to extort the organization. They may also look to sell access to other interested parties. So I guess in in conclusion that the depth and breadth of our products working together not only prevented the taxi’s events, but it also provides our customer with the data and peace of mind that’s going to help them sleep at night. And if you — couple of these products with our services, we have a truly unbeatable combination.

Next slide please, Tim. All right. So obviously, cybersecurity benchmarking is becoming increasingly more important as the cybercriminal landscape has never posed more of a threat to businesses. Again look at 2021 is a banner year unfortunately for cyber theft cyber criminals. And with these cyber criminals increasingly operating like a business, or like the business world. The desire to quickly monetize malware is swiftly growing. In the past 12 months alone, our research and intelligence team has uncovered, what could be one of the world’s largest espionage groups, as well as an enterprise level initial access broker linked to some of the more prevalent ransomware strains from 2021.

SE Labs, a leading independent research agency subjected our BlackBerry Protect and Optics products to a range of real world attacks, designed to compromise systems and penetrate target networks. Now, SE Labs prides itself on providing realistic and honest cybersecurity testing. And they use innovative researchers to replicate the most accurate real world testing scenarios possible. They do this using the same techniques that cyber criminals and other threat actors use to breach systems and networks in the real world.

Now, Breach Response Testing such as this, it’s much more in line with what an organization should expect to see when they’re under siege by a real world dedicated adversary. Traditional endpoint testing, where a sum of well-known malware is kind of dumped on a system and mass to see if it’s detected. It’s not how a real attack will occur as it kind of laid out in the previous slide. And that type of testing really only benefits legacy signature based vendors.

Now, the breach response tests that we participated in, it showed our capabilities to detect and prevent fully against all threats. In every case, when threats were unable to move beyond the earliest stages of that attack chain. So as soon as the target system was exposed to the threat, the attack was immediately detected and blocked from running. And this prevented any of the testing from causing any damage including any type of data theft.

So the combined EPP and EDR solution was able to provide complete prevention, complete detection and zero false positive results. And with that we are in the SE Labs maximum triple A rating for our excellent performance. And this also led to BlackBerry being recognized for its prevention first approach and rated the best new endpoint security offering for 2021.

Slide.

Ryan Permeh

So, what does this mean in the market? Well, the market particularly for endpoint security solutions, or UES, unified endpoint security is often split into traditional and next gen. And next gen antivirus is one of the terms that we actually invented during our early days of Cylance.

Now, what does this mean as we get into the market, just recently, we close a deal with a top 10 global automaker who has been looking for a replacement of a legacy antivirus solution to supplement and serve as sort of the bastion of their wide global network. These networks cover cloud assets they cover data centers, laptops, and onto manufacturing floors. We went in a rigorous head to head proof-of-concept against other major players, including CrowdStrike and Carbon Black in the next gen space.

Now, we ended up winning this deal because this customer saw the inherent value, not just across the breadth of their state, the cloud — the individual endpoints and especially in those partially connected or near connected spaces like manufacturing floors where traditional IT and security folks don’t have as big footprint.

A security solution that can operate autonomously make decisions because of that artificial intelligence and doesn’t need daily updates became a really key business driver for them. The high rate of accuracy in the detections that we’re having beat out all of the competition. And so at the end of the day, they chose us over every other player in this space for a global deployment across every one of their assets. And we’re seeing deals like this day in and day out and have been since the even the earliest days of Cylance.

Next slide please.

Eric Milam

All right. So as cybercriminal operations become more complex, obviously more proactive protection is needed across the whole the attack surface. You have to evolve.

This brought about the creation of extended detection response. XDR is an evolution of EDR. Modifying protection at the endpoint with other security tooling that exists. XDR capabilities are at their core, really about data inclusion and enrichment strategies. This gives security analysts improved visibility and high efficacy detection as well as more effective correlation, investigation and response.

While the endpoint remains the largest threat surface, cyberattacks such as SolarWinds have shown that threat actors can attack anywhere across the network. And Blackberry has taken an approach that allows our products to include data from our native sources, but also to ensure that those who come to us are able to get data from other sources providing a full ecosystem of coverage across a multitude of platforms.

Now, this approach means that our XDR incorporates all the information we have from our suite of products, as well as telemetry from partners and other sources that data is then combined to create additional context, which is then shared as intelligence within our product. And this level of detail creates the opportunity to enable automated responses to remediate a detected threat.

Now, when leveraged for threat hunting purposes, combining this novel intelligence allows us to improve product capabilities and increase market opportunities. This Threat Intelligence enables products to proactively remediate risks and then inform customers of that prevented risk to their organization. And that allows for product development to be proactive to customers’ needs and asks.

And so I think it’s important I want to share kind of a real world example here that we were able to execute last summer. So we began specifically hunting Cobalt Strike Team servers, which are malicious command and control systems that exist out everywhere, kind of on the internet. It’s 30% to 40% of the command and control servers affecting all organizations worldwide.

And so we collected a vast array of their IP addresses and malware associated with these servers. And once we had the first iteration of our data lake, we began to include all the information we’ve been collecting. And within an hour with just that information, we’re able to identify 30 individual organizations that really needed to be contacted immediately.

Now, to give that statement more context, we gathered data into our data lake from disparate systems such as our homegrown threat intelligence projects, conviction data from Protect event data from Optics, network data from Gateway and customer data from our customer relations, relationship management platform. And then we used ML to query these sources, and it helped us quickly identify industry verticals and worldwide regions that were affected. We also identified the regions of the attackers where they were originating from, as well as several other key data points were able to provide to the effect customers.

Now having this has given us a daily opportunity to provide detailed intelligence to our customers, as well as monthly presentations of our what we call indicators of compromise or IOCs and regional and vertical connections with leading government agencies around the world. And our efforts have been so effective that some of those agencies are now sharing their unknown, their IOCs that are unreached with us to enrich them with our intelligence. Right. And that’s huge. That means they’re coming to us, because they don’t know what it is.

And so what began as a research project analyzing native and third party data in mass from our data lake, it expanded it to recently published book which has been lauded by the global research community today.

Next slide.

Ryan Permeh

So these days, the whole game is about data. And we fundamentally consider BlackBerry in its essence a data company, whether we’re talking about the cybersecurity side or the automotive side really, that mass concept of data, that sensor data being collected from the edge whether we’re talking about the accelerometer in your car, or the files being run on your computer, your last face ID connection to your iOS phone or the geolocation and how hard you’re stopping at that stop sign by your house. All of this can be super useful information to give context.

What we found is that, historically, particularly in security, we make very limited contextual decisions. The data I have at hand is all the data I get to understand. With the application of modern Big Data approaches, we can begin to understand a significant amount more and from a wider variety of sensor data than we’ve ever had before. And whether we’re talking about laptops and mobile, whether we’re talking about servers that operate within a cloud or operate within a data center. Users who sit next to each other generally have similar behavior patterns. And we can understand concepts like insider threat by looking at a wide variety of this type of data.

Now, this is all driven by as Eric mentioned, a large scale data lake implementation where data pipelines bring data into our data lake both from our products but also from our partnerships and peers. And really, this comes down to building a data platform. Now this approach applies equally to cybersecurity as it does to automotive.

And as we see the evolution of products and platforms like IV, this type of capability, application of AI and ML, to that core data is really going to accelerate both net new features, but whole new products and services that are born of this. And it really unlocks that the extended and XDR. It lets us consider data from multiple vantage points and across an entire organization. And it enables our customers to do the same.

Next slide, please. One of the key parts of that though, and what really marks you as a platform is your integrations. The way that you can share data with your partners becomes really powerful. And one of the recent ones and a huge one that we recently just announced is a partnership with Exabeam. This allows us to share data both to Exabeam and from Exabeam, allowing our customers who leverage that products suite to gain additional benefit.

And this shows the beginning of a long journey and in bringing data that isn’t just ours. And as we kind of walk this path, one of the key parts of data is privacy, meaning that our customers’ data is our customers’, but it also means openness. Being able to share data with other products that they’ve made investments in and to share that bi-directionally becomes a really key part of our XDR strategy.

While we’re exceedingly happy with the choices that we made in our pillars of our strategy, endpoint on mobile on network, we also understand that many companies have already made significant investments into their security. There’s no reason that we should exclude those investments from benefiting a better understanding of the overall level of risk.

Next slide, please.

Eric Milam

Yeah. So, organizations are suffering from the fatigue of having too many alerts to chase without the ability to quickly prioritizes alerts. It goes to what Ryan was saying, the amount of data, the sheer amount of data that’s there. Security teams are tasked with enhancing their organization’s security maturation. However, they’re limited by skillset tools and technology.

Many customers, they don’t have the resource for security operations center. But even when they do, they can’t find the right people. And so interestingly, putting staffing shortages, expertise gaps, budgetary shortfalls, employee turnover and kind of all the other issues aside, the attacks themselves are becoming so complex, that organizations can’t tell if they’re generic or are actually being targeted. And this makes attack significantly more difficult to detect. And if they are detected, for security organizations to gauge the extent of the compromise and damage.

So, organizations are looking to companies like us like Blackberry, that have an established reputation for security expertise to help them manage their risk. And this brings us to an area where we’ve seen growth in both revenue and pipeline. So BlackBerry Guard is our managed XDR service that provides 24 by 7 monitoring. In December, we announced that our Guard team can now provide around the clock coverage to not only the customers’ EPP and EDR data Protect and Optics, but now also Persona, their mobile data and our Gateway products.

And with the combination of our endpoint security products and expert security analysts, we can provide customers with the ability to kind of breathe and rest assured that that they’re that they’re taken care of and they’re watched over. And so true managed XDR is extremely complicated. And it takes a unique skill set that most organizations again, they just don’t have.

A key component of this skill set is related to the detection piece, which is directly kind of means human led threat hunting and intelligence. This ability leads to increased detections and direct improvement of the enterprise protective platform. Not individual doing threat hunting, they have to understand an ever evolving threat landscape. And threat hunters need to be able to understand if there’s an act of attack as quickly as possible. And to do this, they must be constantly researching threat actors, tactics, techniques and procedures.

An effective response component and manage XDR allows for the immediate disruption of the attack chain. It begins the incident response process, really, with a competent understanding of the threat, including root cause and the potential effect to the organization. The goal of response is to be able to tell the full story around the event and not just identify that an event occurred. It’s all about the context that you’re able to provide.

A coordinated and effective response, obviously paramount in ensuring the ability to prioritize and investigates alerts quickly and effectively. And it allows for organizations to prioritize alerts with business context in a way that leads to a timely determination of the scope and impact of that incident. So when — basically what I’m saying is when a customer has Guard, they have a team that works on their behalf to detect threats in a timely manner to reduce the time needed to respond to those threats. And overall, this really helps lower the cost of cyber threat investigation for an organization. It mitigates business interruption and through that, obviously, any unplanned costs associated with cyber threats.

Next slide, please.

Ryan Permeh

So I want to thank everybody for joining us today. Blackberry has had a long and storied history. And we’re really looking forward to the future of securing every endpoint. Whether we’re talking about traditional IT space or the IoT space. Security is in our DNA. And we focus on this. We’re a leading next generation cybersecurity company, in fact invented it.

We focus on AI, with a particular focus on preventing attacks from starting so that you don’t have to clean up after them later. We have third-party industry recognition of our products, as well as deal recognition from our products. Winning head-to-head on not just against the traditional legacy players but the going head-to-head against some of the other names in the next gen space like CrowdStrike and SentinelOne.

XDR is a long-term future. And we’ve made significant investments through multiple product lines, bringing the data together to really empower an XDR strategy that doesn’t just include our products, but also those of our partners and the existing products within our customers. And finally, our Guard managed service brings this to the spot where we can actually enable this in customers to produce value right now.

Thank you so much for your time today. I’ll leave — I’ll pass it on.

Tim Foote

Matt, you’re on mute. Come on, man. Back to you.

Matt Calitri

I still muted?

Tim Foote

You’re all good now.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Matt Calitri

Beautiful. Thank you guys for walking through that. I guess. And just one quick one here. In terms of your time and sort of in an extension of your summary there, what would you say are your biggest priorities in the year ahead? And what do you want investors to kind of — to walk away with as a takeaway message?

Tim Foote

Sure. Let me take this one. So it’s growth, Matt. So both on the cyber side, particularly on the cyber side, and also on the IoT side, it’s top-line growth. That is the main priority. So we brought in John Giamatteo, who was previously Chief Revenue Officer and President at McAfee. And that is his number one goal. So we’ve been doing a lot of things. Obviously, the guys here have spoken about bringing some products to market that have closed the gap that has been holding us back, namely the EDR gap, which has now caught up with our Optics 3.0. And we’ve ramping up our go-to-market to really capitalize on that.

So that’s in the form of increased headcount, feet on the street, its enhanced relationships with channel partners, because we do a lot of selling through third-party channel partners. And it’s also about brand recognition, that’s through advertising, but also working with respected analysts, like the SE Labs to make sure that our product is evaluated properly. And those insights can be shared with those who are making the buying decisions.

So a lot of things going on. We’re very excited about where we are as a business. The market opportunity is huge. We feel that we’ve got some leading technology in this space, is now a question of executing on the go-to-market and capitalizing on those on those assets.

Matt Calitri

Awesome. That’s a great message. So, Ryan, Eric and Tim, thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who viewed as well. Hope everyone has a great remainder of the conference. And we’ll talk to you guys soon.

Ryan Permeh

Thanks, Matt. Thanks, everybody.

Eric Milam

Thanks.

Matt Calitri

Bye.

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