An Exciting New Chapter for Forescout
There are few moments in a company’s lifetime that you can truly deem as monumental. I’ve been lucky enough to be present for a few of these at Forescout, like ringing the opening bell for our IPO or launching our first cloud product. Today is another one of those days. We just successfully closed our transaction to be acquired by Advent International, a leading global private equity investor. Advent has partnered with Crosspoint Capital Partners, a private equity investment firm focused on the cybersecurity and privacy industries, on this transaction. With this milestone, Forescout is once again a private company and begins an exciting new phase.
Advent’s technology investment team, headed by Bryan Taylor, has deep experience in the cybersecurity software space. Bryan has led investments in bellwethers like McAfee and rapidly scaling disruptors like Tanium. Advent is also one of the best when it comes to business model transitions, which we are going through right now with our move to cloud and SaaS-based solutions. Crosspoint Capital, led by Greg Clark, brings a ton of technical and industry expertise as well. And Greg knows about being a Forescout customer first-hand, having deployed our solution across the entire enterprise when he was CEO of Symantec. The Advent and Crosspoint Capital teams are already demonstrating their passion for helping us grow and addressing our huge and evolving market opportunity to deliver an active defense for the Enterprise of Things.
The world is changing … and so is the enterprise.
Technology always starts simple – a key, a camera, a light bulb, a phone, a computer – and then inevitably gets more complex. A light bulb 10 years ago simply turned on and off at the flick of a switch. Today, it can do much more, connecting to your phone and automatically adjusting based on your schedule or the time of day. Now extrapolate this across the billions of connected devices around the world and what it means to the largest organizations across every industry.
We used to call this IoT. But now we know it is much bigger than that. Today, the modern enterprise is an Enterprise of Things. The device landscape is more diverse and bigger than ever before, going from three operating systems a decade ago to tens of thousands today, each with their own proprietary technology. These devices stretch across IoT, OT, workloads and managed devices. Add to that the cloud and a rush to a remote workforce, and there’s no doubt we’re in a new era of device connectivity.
The benefits of this new world are huge. Organizations have flocked to connected devices because of the increased capabilities, like monitoring, automation and more. Many of those benefits have proven to be true – just look at building automation systems, smart utility metering or connected medical devices.
But so too have the cyberthreats. Many of these devices have not been designed with security in mind, and each presents a new door for an attacker to enter and compromise an environment. This is one of the biggest security threats of our time. And yesterday’s security strategies and technologies won’t solve for this modern threat.
The story for us at Forescout began in network access control. We recognized early the increasing threat posed by the many newly connected devices and pioneered agentless visibility across heterogeneous networks. We then took that solution from the campus and applied it across the data center, cloud and Operational Technology (OT) environments.
Now, in today’s Enterprise of Things (EoT) world, we are starting our next chapter. Companies want to be custodians of this vast network of devices, not victims of it. This requires an active defense – at scale and in real time. In practice, that means being able to have continuously adaptive protection from threats through up-to-date, cloud-scale risk analysis – all informed by the network effect and data from thousands of other customers with millions of devices. That knowledge can then be used to identify, segment and enforce compliance of EVERY connected thing.
We also recognize that we live in an increasingly cloud-first world. As a private company, joining forces with Advent and Crosspoint Capital will enable us to invest more aggressively in our product and technology roadmap and execute on our cloud-first strategy. This will deliver the solutions customers need and help us drive an increasingly predictable ratable revenue model.
At the same time, we will continue to innovate and collaborate with our technology partners so we can together address the most advanced cybersecurity threats and network security administrative challenges. We remain the same Forescout family for our employees and committed partner and innovator for our customers.
A new stage of our journey at Forescout is just beginning, and I am thrilled about all that is ahead. I would like to thank our customers, partners, shareholders and all of our employees for believing in Forescout and helping us get to where we are today. Our success so far would not be possible without each and every one of you. Now, onto the next chapter!