Perth-headquartered cybersecurity specialist firm CSO Group found itself in a unique position in 2019 when its biggest vendor partner Symantec was acquired by chipmaker Broadcom and the vendor changed way it worked with its channel partners.
The change saw CSO Group gradually pivot away from the partner that had brought it early growth, and diversify its offerings.
In the years after CSO Group was founded in 2016, it became one of Symantec’s major Australian partners, even taking home the vendor’s ANZ and Pacific partner of the year award in 2019. That relationship also helped to grow the business’s revenue by 167.31 percent to $9.14 million in the same year, landing CSO Group in fourth place in the 2019 CRN Fast50.
While Symantec is no longer the company’s key partner, CSO Group’s sales have continued to increase, growing by 124 percent to $27.8 million dollars in its last financial year to earn it ninth place in the 2022 CRN Fast50. More than half of CSO Group’s revenue came from state government, and it is particularly proud of a New South Wales whole of government deal it won with Mimecast, and one of the world's first Spectra Alliance solution deployments.
CEO Michael Simkovic spoke to CRN about the evolution of the company’s partnerships: “When we started the business, we worked with Symantec and built a partnership which was quite unique. But in 2020, we pivoted from that position and Broadcom’s acquisition [of Symantec] probably accelerated our strategy around that,” he said.
“We looked at the market to see who were the best vendor partners to create an integrated and orchestrated partner network, where we brought together technology vendors that really complimented one another.”
CSO now works closely with NetSkope, Mimecast, CrowdStrike and Okta as an integrated partner landscape. “We built a capability to bring that together to deliver that as an outcome for our customers and not just individual pieces of technology,” Simkovic said.
Simkovic said the changes with Symantec helped teach CSO Group a significant lesson about risk. It also showed that the company was able to pivot, and could do it again if necessary.
More recently, CSO has restructured to change the way it works with customers, moving away from just deploying some technology to ensuring customers are getting pragmatic security outcomes.
“For us it’s developing deep partnerships with our vendor partners and deep partnerships with our customers as well,” Simkovic said. “To do that, we work hard on attracting the right people to the organisation so the quality of staff and the staff that actually are very closely aligned to our culture.”
To overcome skills shortages, CSO Group has focussed on cross-skilling, bringing in people from other perspectives of the IT market and from the consulting space.
It has also invested in its sales force, increasing its presence on Australia’s east coast and its ability to get CSO Group’s message out and engage with customers.
CSO also expanded its board of directors, which is led by Simkovic and chairman Tony Carr and also includes directors Michael Ricci, Wayne Gowland and chief security and technology officer Hank Clark.
Like many security providers, CSO Group has seen strong demand due to remote working.
“The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in helping realise that the workforce then became a distributed workforce for a lot of customers, and they realised they needed to provide the capability for people to work remotely, and realise they need to work remotely, securely,” Simkovic said.
“Cyber as an industry is seeing some benefits from the change in workforce structure and workforce management, but what we’re also seeing is that some recent, very public security breaches and the new compliance requirements now becoming much broader have helped customers realise that they have an obligation to protect data and the workforce they’ve got in their organisations.”
Looking ahead, market consolidation and the link between cybersecurity and digital transformation are on Simkovic’s radar.
“In the broader cybersecurity market, there’s been a fair bit of consolidation – there will continue to be mergers and acquisitions within the market, but then there’s the evolution of how intrinsic cybersecurity plays now into broader digital transformation activities and probably trying to get ahead of the curve,” Simkovic said.
“So we are doing some planning on that, recognising that we have to look at different skills and characteristics that we want to bring in the team and see how we structure our position for that, because customers are asking us questions in relation to digital transformation, security by design, et cetera.”
Automation is also a focus, with Simkovic flagging plans to invest in automation technologies and keep up with customer demand.
“We’re going to have to automate a lot more, so there’s further investment that we need to do just to keep up with the volume and make sure it is efficient and price-competitive for customers to say, ‘I can afford that’,” Simkovic said.
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