Sophos CEO: 'We have just scratched the surface'

Kris Hagerman claims the vendor can vastly extend its market reach with its approach to end-point and network security

Sophos chief Kris Hagerman (pictured) claims the security vendor has only just "scratched the surface" with its market reach.

Speaking to CRN, Hagerman said the end-point security player can reach out to more customers that sit below the top enterprise firms.

"We are very proud about what we have been able to accomplish as a company," he said. "We have been around for about 30 years and we do about $500m (£329m) in billings; we are growing at over 24 per cent a year and we have 200,000 customers all over the world. So we feel like we have arrived as one of the global leaders in security.

"That said, there are 50 to 60 million of these organisations that are not in the global 2000, and we feel like we have a robust opportunity to help and serve them much better than they are being served today. While we are very proud of the 200,000 customers we have brought on, we feel like we have just scratched the surface of the opportunity we have in front of us."

In June, the Abingdon-headquartered vendor floated on the London Stock Exchange, and Hagerman claimed this has helped to raise the company's profile.

"The one difference [since the IPO] is we are playing on a brightly lit stage," he said. "And one of the reasons we were excited about becoming public was to help raise the visibility and awareness of Sophos around the world. And we feel it certainly helped out in that regard."

And with its latest financial results released last week, it seems Sophos is enjoying life as a public company. For the six months to 30 September, the vendor's non-GAAP EBITDA was at $45.5m, compared with $41.8m in FY15. This was on GAAP revenues of $234.2m, which were up from $215.1m in the same period the previous year.

"We are very pleased with our results for our first complete half-year period as a public company," he said. "We grew 24 per cent year on year and we raised the outlook for billings and EBITDA margin. We are outgrowing the market in end-user and network security.

"The overall highlight is we are one of the real leaders in the high-growth space of IT security and we are pursuing a unique strategy to take advantage of that. We feel there is no one doing that the way we are and we feel like we are getting better at it every day."

Hagerman said this unique approach is based around a channel-only go-to-market strategy and also its focus on "the other 60 million small and mid-market enterprises", while most other security vendors concentrate only on the world's largest companies.

Last week Sophos also unveiled a new product offering, its XG Firewall with Security Heartbeat, which it claims links network and end-point security to prevent and remediate advanced attacks. Hagerman said this product is also testament to the firm's uniqueness, as it forms part of its strategy to dominate both the network and end-point security markets.

"No one has ever been a leader in both [end-point and network security], and that is exactly what we are doing. We pushed that forward [last week] when we announced a new product offering that for the first time links together security and end-point security. It's like giving two security guards inside and outside the building a radio. That's how we are different."