Last week Colorado's own Accuvant announced the acquisition of FishNet Security, an Investcorp company located in Kansas City. The combined entity will have revenues of over $1.5B and an employee base of 1,400 making it the largest pure play information security company in the country. Yesterday Accuvant Co-Founder and CEO, Dan Burns, told a group of us assembled at DU that his vision was to build "the Accenture of Information Security" and hopes to have a worldwide presence and revenues double where they are today in the next 2-3 years.
Those are lofty goals but the company under Dan's leadership has exhibited over 70x growth since it's inception in 2002 and with the large investment by Blackstone last year to add real capital fuel to that growth and a $70-80B global market for cyber security those goals sound almost too conservative. Pre-acquisition, the company serves over 6,200 clients including over 50% of the Fortune 500 and 50% of the Fortune 100 companies. Eighty-five percent of their business comes from repeat customers. That is a strong endorsement. As Dan told us, their success is based on a security success methodology, that takes into account the clients' maturity and risk tolerance and builds a measurable and actionable framework for success. That is built around a client-first culture and augmented with some of the industry's best talent.
To bolster that talent pool, Dan is also extremely focused on aggressive training and recruitment programs with the eight top cyber security programs in colleges such as the University of Maryland, Iowa State and University of Montana. They have yet to tap into the talent at CU, CSU and DU but we will have to change that in the coming years.
Dan Burns, Accuvant CEO
Dan has a great pedigree and has been in information security almost his entire career. He ran sales at OneSecure and was instrumental in their transition from a managed security services provider to a product business providing the first intrusion prevention system (IPS) to the nascent industry and also had successful stints at Exault, Access Graphics, Arrowpoint, and Netrex, where he supported some of the largest telecommunications companies in the country in building their information security programs. Dan knows cyber security and talk about the right place at the right time. Dan likes to say, "even a blind squirrel finds a nut now and again, and this is my nut." What a great nut it is for Dan and for the Colorado entrepreneurial ecosystem at large.
Congrats to Dan, Blackstone and the entire team on the Fishnet acquisition and for building such a cyber security powerhouse right here on the Front Range!
