Former Softcat execs hunting partners for new cyber venture

Matthew Helling and Adam Louca are ploughing their own furrow with Arco Cyber

Two former Softcat executives are scouting for channel partners to join their new cybersecurity company, Arco Cyber.

Matthew Helling and Adam Louca left Softcat at the end of last year after a combined 30 years at the firm to address what they felt was a gap in the cybersecurity space with their own project.

Speaking with CRN, the duo explained how Arco Cyber was born out of the realisation that organisations are still struggling to make the best cyber decisions for their businesses.

"Arco is a combination of Adam and myself and our time in Softcat in our experience in working with organisations in helping them to understand risk in their business," said Helling.

"While we were at Softcat, we had responsibility for a number of different functions, from sales to audit and assessment, services through to managed services.

"One of the continual things we were seeing was the customer's ability to quantify risk to their organisation and how they were going to mitigate against it."

One half of Arco's founders explained how they saw a lot of confusion within organisations around where they should be investing their capital and how to get the most from the money they're putting into the platforms that they're buying.

"With Arco, what we built is a data-led insights platform for organisations. We're taking feeds from a wide range of customers that we've engaged with already and we've got threat intelligence built into it. And then we're taking a lot of data and information from existing controls in organisations to understand the efficiency of those control sets.

"We take all this information to help organisations to understand risk in their business and build a plan to mitigate and how best to invest longer term to reduce the risks that are specific to them."

What Arco is bringing to the table

The pair claim Arco is bringing something new to the cyber space with a focus on cyber insights and simplifying the "cyber puzzle" rather than cyber capabilities.

"One of the things I think makes us different is that we're not just trying to put another tool in to swap something existing out. It's actually really about helping customers understand where they should be focusing their time and understand how to drive more value out of their existing investments," said Louca.

"Those informed decisions could be understanding where they should be spending their money, maximising the efficiency or value in their existing investments, focusing on the right things next, or communicating more effectively to business leaders or to board members to get buy-in for cybersecurity and wide support and investments."

The hunt for channel partners

The London-HQ group 100 per cent sees value in the UK channel, its founders said.

Helling detailed how he learned at Softcat that there are "some great vendors out there", but it can be frustrating from a partner perspective when vendors state they're 100 per cent channel when in reality they're more of a mix.

"We do understand that when you're building a business you need to take ownership of projects that are running, but that transition from direct sales to 100 per cent always comes with friction," he said.

"One of the things we've identified is the partnership, reseller, MSSP kind of businesses that are out there, if they have the capabilities internally because there is a big service offering that comes with Arco in helping organisations to plan out and build those projects longer term.

"There is an absolute opportunity for those to adopt Arco and take it to market and help their customer base realise that value.

"In addition to that, you've got the VAD world. We've seen a lot of these organisations starting to build and evolve their services capabilities.

"So we're having conversations with a number of VADs in the UK around, actually what is their service capability, is there an appetite for them to adopt Arco as a platform to then take to the partners and resellers that perhaps don't have that consulting arm or that that level of customer maturity that they can run it themselves? And can they then in turn, look to service the wider market."