Changing Competitive Landscape
CP: In terms of the competitive landscape, have your competitors changed over time? How does Arctic Wolf stay one step ahead of that competition?
BS: Yes, it has evolved, and it’s evolved because we’ve added new solutions. We’ve expanded the envelope of capabilities that we’re bringing to our customers, and as a result, there are different competitors that enter the marketplace when we go to manage risk, for example, then when we’re doing MDR. And so it’s plentiful and numerous, but I would say it’s companies that do things similar to us. So if they’re in MDR, we’re competing with them in the MDR space. If they’ve got a managed risk portfolio, we’re competing with companies in managed risk now. We have managed awareness, so we’re bringing training and enablement capabilities to employees at our customer locations so that they can learn to be better protected, and aware and safe in terms of cybersecurity threats. That’s because oftentimes it comes in through the employees and through all sorts of different vectors like phishing or identity management, and things like that.
Another is managed cloud operations that we’re doing. And now, of course, there’s our latest acquisition position around incident response. So we have different competitors in each of those, depending on the market segment and the focus of our products. But then there’s also a competitive landscape around the security strategy that a customer may have. So some customers may have a do-it-yourself mentality where they’re going to try to hire, train, manage, enable and grow their own security professionals within their organization, and try and do it themselves. So that’s also a competitive pressure that we have to overcome with some customers.