SecureWorks Chief Revenue Officer Geoff Haydon, now on the job for two months, has four key focus areas for the managed security service provider's new fiscal year.
They include:
- People: Progressing, elevating and expanding our sales team and markets around the globe.
- Productivity. Increasing the efficiency of existing team members and accelerating the onboarding of new team members.
- Coverage. Optimizing the MSSP's coverage model worldwide.
- Message and methodology: Defining and executing sales plays that are repeatable and drive growth.
Haydon, a former RSA and EMC executive, joined Secureworks to lead the company's global go-to-market strategy in February. Most recently, he was CEO of Canadian-based IT security solutions provider Absolute Software Corporation.
Haydon's near-term priorities surfaced during SecureWorks' fiscal Q4 2018 earnings call earlier today. Although CEO Michael Cote was pleased with the quarter, Wall Street analysts had mixed views on the company's performance. Revenue increased 1.4 percent to $120.7 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018, up slightly from $118.9 million in the same period last year. The company's stock fell 2 percent on the news, basically signaling some mixed views about the company's outlook for the current year.
SecureWorks: Research, Respect and Revenue Mix
Still, the MSSP remains widely respected in the market -- landing in Gartner's 2018 Magic Quadrant for Managed Security Services, Worldwide -- the 10th consecutive time the company has been recognized as the leader in this report. Also, SecureWorks surfaced in our own Top 100 MSSP report in 2017. (The 2018 report will surface in September.)
SecureWorks continues to win sizable managed security engagements. The company closed 16 contracts worth greater than $1 million, which represents a 45% sequential increase in the number of deals in that group, Cote indicated.
Moreover, a typical customer spends $96,000 annually with the company, a 10.7% increase over the prior year, according to CFO Wayne Jackson. Global expansion also accelerated. Revenue outside the U.S. reached 17.7% of total revenue for the quarter, up from 14.7% last year, primarily on consistently strong growth in both EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) and APJ (Asia-Pacific and Japan), Jackson added.
SecureWorks Enterprise Push: All About Deal Size
Overall, the company is emphasizing deal size growth over customer logo wins. "I would expect us to continue to see and focus on increasing our average revenue per client first but continuing to focus on increasing the number of clients," Cote said during the call.
The company also continues to push toward the enterprise space, where the average size of that contract is about 10 times that of an SMB client, CFO Jackson estimated.
On the partner front, SecureWorks continues to work closely with parent Dell Technologies -- which maintains a large stake in the company. "In this upcoming calendar year, there has been a change in the quarter carriers across the Dell organization are getting total credit not just the referral stiff for anything that they sell for SecureWorks," Coted indicated. "So, we are excited and cautiously optimistic that there will be a continued uptick of sales opportunities both jointly and referrals from the Dell Technology sales force and clearly Geoff Hayden’s relationship with the EMC sellers and the RSA organization should be positive in that."
Monetizing SecureWorks Intellectual Property
Another key company priority: Sharing and monetizing historical attack data -- the algorithm, analytics and machine learning -- with customers and community members.
SecureWorks started that sharing journey about a year ago, experimenting with a prototype approach at the time. At this point the company is "putting a lot more effort and energy into it" and expects to have some alpha testers in the next 90 days, Cote predicts. Still, revenue from the IP-related strategy won't likely materialize until the company's fiscal 2020 or so, he added.
