Corero Network Security plc (LON:CNS) Chief Executive Officer Carl Herberger caught up with DirectorsTalk to discuss the company’s Edinburgh Investor and Analyst Day, its software-only DDoS protection model, AI-driven automation, alliance partnerships, and future investor events.
Q1: Corero recently hosted a successful investor and analyst day in Edinburgh. Why did you choose Edinburgh as the location for your event?
A1: First of all, it is a beautiful city, and it has a rich investment community, but the main reason is all of our R&D essentially at Corero is accomplished in Edinburgh. We have a complement of about 30/ 35 research and development engineers that were there. We thought that we would cohabitate the investor conversation along with a product demonstration. So, that was the goal of the event, which I think came off wonderfully.
Q2: Could you share your key takeaways from that event?
A:2 So, this is the second time that we’ve done this investor day in Edinburgh, and I think we’ve improved upon it. It really was, from my perspective, a really fulfilling and wonderful day.
We had an audience of approximately 20 people that were on site and then we did a virtual, able to dial in conversation, and we focused the conversation around the things that were atypical to a typical road show.
We double-clicked on our portfolio product so that our head of engineering could walk through our product strategy and roadmap and show them demonstrable evidence of how our tools work. We actually had our Head of Threat Research come in, her name is Teresa Carlin, and she gave an overview of what the formidable problem is that we’re addressing with these products and where the trend is on that problem and why we have some resolute, unique selling positions in the marketplace.
We ended it with our new hire Michelle McBain, who’s running our Global Alliances and Channels Partner programmes, and her new strategy to take our business forward in that strategy and why she joined the company from that she comes with an amazing background behind her. She’s joined us with a lot of energy and a lot of fanfare.
So, these were double-clicks essentially on topics that we would just topically cover during a road show. We had the ability for investors now to take it to a much deeper level and be able to see what’s going on with the company. As a result, we got very, very positive feedback, both on the agenda, the content, and the use of time.
Q3: You mentioned the different products that you put on show as a demonstration. Can you just talk us through those USPs?
A3: At the highest level, our most fundamental unique selling position is that we’re a software-only company. Although we sell hardware, it doesn’t represent even 10% of our business today. In our hardware, there’s nothing special about it, we just install our software onto a purpose-built box for ourselves. So, this software-only approach is the only vendor that works that way. There’s a couple of reasons why:
- We’re the only company that started out in this industry fundamentally trying to address this business problem from our inception. Every other vendor that’s in this industry entered this space from an adjacent business portfolio and as such, their products were not advantaged to the problem. Their products address most of the problem, but not all of the problem. So, that software-only approach and the fact that all we do is solve this cyber resiliency problem from cyber-attacks. That’s really tremendously unique.
- We’re the only ones to offer a fully managed solution in a marketplace and with that fully managed solution, we demonstrated our AI capabilities. So, we’re rolling out a robust schedule of artificial intelligence that really adds to both the speed of detection, speed of mitigation, and frankly, the automation of security operations for running DDoS. That’s also extremely unique to us.
- We actually showed demonstrations around our alliance partners that we have. So, we have a very strong set of partners that we go to market with, including HPE, Juniper Networks, as well as Akamai and GTT and there are going to be others as the years go on. We showed how that uniqueness, in other words, if you have any of that portfolio product in your IT inventory, the best solution you can have with that portfolio for DDoS would be Corero. We demonstrated that.
Those are three topical ones. There are many, many others but essentially, it’s our software-only approach, which allows for DDoS anywhere and extensibility at speed. It’s our fully managed services, it’s our integration with our alliance partners and of course, we have an industry-leading speed to detection, speed to mitigation capability that’s been verified by independent analysis year in and year out.
So, we’re very, very happy about the automation of the tool.
Q4: You mentioned DDoS there a couple of times. With attacks increasing in frequency and in speed, has DDoS protection become a must to ensure that businesses stay online?
A4: Still today, DDoS remains the second most voluminous target in cybersecurity. First, you have ransomware, I think many people know ransomware. I think actually DDoS has become a kitchen table term, although people may not understand exactly how it manifests itself. I think they understand the problem and that continues to pervade.
What people don’t understand is that the nature of DDoS changes with the nature of technology. So, for example, now that we have AI, the DDoS threat pervades through an ever increasingly AI problem and makes it get even more pervasive. Oof course, then, each time the technology stack changes, when we go from client server to SaaS applications, from SaaS applications to AI applications, the DDoS problem manifests itself.
Let me give you an example. DDoS is all about denying availability to an application or to an infrastructure. AI has this fundamental challenge that infrastructurally it must process very close to a lot of servers so if you can take out those servers, you can take out a whole AI infrastructure. If you could take out an AI response to your business today, you probably have your business completely down and out and the ways that people are trying to attack AI infrastructure is through DDoS.
It’s pretty amazing how this evolution is happening. DDoS now is becoming a prerequisite to actually the build out of data centres, of AI infrastructure, frankly, of businesses.
Q5: Do Corero have plans for other investor events for the remainder of the year?
A5: Yes, we do. We are planning an investor event in New York in July, to be confirmed on dates, but we’re targeting approximately the third week to do an investor event in New York and perhaps even a little roadshow around it. We will be attending the Canaccord Investor Conference in Boston that they have every single year. So, we will be there in force for the whole time and look forward to attending for any investors that might be attending that conference. Based upon a successful New York event, we might continue to do another one in the fall.
