Executive Interview: Accuvant CEO Provides Inside View of FishNet Security Merger

This week at RSA Conference in San Francisco, the marriage between managed security service giants Accuvant and FishNet Security was truly consummated with announcement of a new name for the newly merged organization, Optiv Security. With plans to start operating under the new brand by summer, executives with the firm have wasted no time prepping the organization for this final step and leading it through the hard work of integration.

MSPmentor.net caught up with CEO Dan Burns to discuss how this work has been progressing and what other managed service providers could learn from such a massive deal. Here's what he said.

MSPmentor: So give us a temperature check. How are things going with the transition so far?

Burns: I'm happy to say things are going incredibly well, they really, really are.  It’s amazing when you take a look at what we did. We took two companies of equal size, $750 million top line company, $750 million top line company with about 750 employees on both sides as well, we brought them together and created a $1.5 billion dollar company relatively quickly with 1500 employees and 60 offices across the U.S.  So almost overnight we became the largest information security solutions provider in the world. I don’t know of any company that’s nearly the size.  And naturally when you do something that big you wonder how it’s going to go.

I think the good news for us is we knew each other very, very well.  I knew a lot of the executives on their side, they had known us for a long time. It was pretty clear to me prior to doing the deal that we were very similar in terms of culture. Even beyond culture, we’re really similar in the fact that both companies and people from both sides are very passionate about and committed to the cyber security space.  So when you’ve got similar cultures and you’ve got people that are passionate about what they’re doing, bringing those teams together is much easier. 

MSPmentor: What about from the client perspective? How has this impacted joint clients?

Burns: I think the other key to our success in merging the two companies has been the minimal client overlap. It’s amazing. 

Legacy Accuvant has 5,000 clients, and legacy FishNet Security has 5,000 clients. You bring those together, there’s only 3 percent overlap in client base. That’s a big help. It actually also speaks to the size of the space. People may have thought we were fierce competitors and going after the same accounts our entire careers. Well, when you unpeel the onion a little bit, it was rare that we were actually fierce competitors. 

MSPmentor: How quickly did you start integrating the two organizations together?

Burns: Almost immediately after the ink dried on the deal, and it was a lot of fun for me personally to see this transformation happen.  We closed the deal on January 28, and four or five days later we brought the sales teams together in Denver.

Everybody from legacy FishNet, everybody from legacy Accuvant, the entire field sales team plus all management came into town.  Day one, as you would expect, there was a little bit of apprehension, maybe a little bit of chest pounding.  We spoke to the entire audience, we talked about the vision and the mission and the strategy of the organization moving forward, and then day two you just saw that apprehension disappear.  And day three and four was hug fest, it was a ton of fun. 

So I think the timing for that was so outstanding.  My biggest take-away in that early part of the merger was the sooner you get your teams together and you get your people together and you get the company and the organization together the better.  Dispel the myths and address them, and answer questions as quickly as possible.  And when we left Denver, everybody on both sides were just so excited because we realized we were cut from the same fabric.

MSPmentor: What were the biggest concerns and myths that you had to dispel early on?

Burns: Naturally, when you bring two organizations together of equal size, the sales organization is going to be the first to be apprehensive.  They’re going to wonder, oh my goodness, my accounts are going to be ripped in half, my territory is going to be shrunk, my paycheck, therefore, is in jeopardy, all of those sorts of things. 

So the sooner we could communicate that in our situation that’s just not the case, we’ve done the analytics behind this, a lot of it, we spent a lot of time ripping apart the numbers, ripping apart the client base, ripping apart everything.  The analytics that were put behind this were incredible.  Hundreds and hundreds of pages of what we look like as an organization, what they look like as an organization.  So the sooner we could profess that and speak about that, the sooner we could dispel their fears.  Always sales is one of the biggest fears.  Accounts are going to be taken away, all of that kind of stuff, and in this situation it wasn’t an issue. 

MSPmentor: Logistically, were there any issues in how you had to change just the way customer management and sales processes worked? What have been some of the biggest challenges?

Burns: Yes, definitely. We had to spend a lot of time gathering all that data and looking across the whole of our clients and which reps covered which clients and how much business each rep did with each client.  We had to have the information in front of us.  So if Joe Schmo the salesperson in Atlanta said that Home Depot was his account and he has done millions and millions of dollars with them, well, we had to have the numbers there to either prove or disprove it.  So a lot of work went into gathering all the data.

The field sales managers had that at their fingertips and could immediately sit down with the teams as they brought them together and had those in some cases difficult conversations, and in many cases not difficult at all.  Because when you have the data at your fingertips you can easily point to it. 

MSPmentor: How about the integration of the consulting teams?

Burns: I think the other challenge that we were faced with was bringing the consulting organizations together. You’ve got unbelievably talented, knowledgeable security people on both sides, and often those people can be opinionated. They’re fun, but they can often be opinionated. Again, what we did quickly was break down what each side brought to the table in terms of capabilities and service offerings and all of those sorts of things.

And when you broke it down, legacy FishNet Security brought a lot of new things to the table for legacy Accuvant. They have a big practice in identity and access management, as an example. We had been too busy to get into that field, as one example. And on the flip side, Accuvant, we had spent a lot of time building our applied research team and other really high level kind of leading edge services. So when we took everything and we laid it out, it was really clear to the consultants on the legacy Accuvant side that, wow, they have a lot of things that we don’t have, and vice versa, we’re going to be able to upsell in these situations.

I was thrilled to see the consultants so quickly come together and say, again, 'You’re all really good and talented, we’re all really good and talented, and we’re all passionate about the space, so why don’t we get together?' And when you put this all together and you look at the breadth of solutions that we bring to the table, nobody else in the world has it, no one. And so I would say by doing this deal we put ourselves at least five or seven years ahead of the nearest competitor and we’re not slowing down any time soon.